Brown Girls in the Matrix & Deep Dream Aesthetics
I am a black girl.
Yes it’s true.
Don’t let the looks fool you.
I am a black girl who is articulate…
I read a poem by April Chukwueke (age 15) titled “I Am a Black Girl” (see above) and it made me think of Cheslie Kryst, Kaliegh Garris, Zozibini Tunzi and Nia Franklin who recently made beauty pageant history as black women winning five major titles for the first time.
But I am a black girl because I’ve survived those nights.
Yeah, those sleepless nights, and the internal fights,
Scrutinizing my nappy fro and my African nose.
I thought about one of my former students (Janelin) who was really good at coding in AP Computer Science Principles but did not accept it. Another former student (Stacey) recently got a job as a software engineer. Both of them were visual arts majors. Enrolled as an independent study, Stacey decided to explore the phenomenon of people touching her hair without her permission. Irish-Nigerian scholar Emma Dabiri made this the focus of her new book, “Don’t Touch My Hair.”
I am a black girl because I’ve been told I’m too tough,
Too rough, too dark,
To ever be enough.
Using Deep Dream I’ve been able to explore the relationship between beauty, blackness (identity) and algorithms. Here, the Gatys’ Gram-matrix based Neural Style Transfer strikes again. I sometimes generate several images from one source image but with different styles until I get the result I want. In some cases the layering is unnecessary.
Deep Dream allows me to push beyond traditional portraiture to otherworldly places. I’m discovering how much I like the color blue or how the machine uses the blue in the skin of the girls and women. In West African culture — in Yoruba, specifically — there’s a quality called Itutu or coolness, which is represented by the color blue. To have this quality means to be connected to the divine. This concept came over with the Africans during the Middle Passage and now it has made its way into the algorithm.
I am a black girl because I am courageous,
And the colored women before me changed nations.
I am a masterpiece of creation, the quintessence of liberation
And the beautiful reality of my ancestors’ imagination.
At a time when so many black girls are punished more at school, harassed and excluded because of their choice of hairstyles, or abducted and murdered it has been my intention to explore our beauty in new ways and in ways that some might find pleasing to look at but always engaging. In many ways 2019 was the Year of the Black Girl/Woman, so that is the dedication for this series of ‘algorhythmic’ artworks.