Aftrotech and Outer Spaces - Brief Article

The advent of electronic media and the information age has had a profound impact on social interaction and cultural identity. We have all found our notions of consciousness, our perceptions of reality, and our daily lives altered and reconstituted by this technological change. Electronic technology, especially digital, seems to have pierced the protective bubble of fixed racial and ethnic identity by making it easy for us to create physically detached screen personas that transcend social realities. Yet in spite of the current cultural climate, which we like to believe has released us from the constraints of identity, the mechanisms of exclusion still persist. I invited a small group of writers, curators, and artists whose work considers the expression of individual, collective, and speculative experiences in contemporary art to reflect on the junction of the "black subject" and technology.

I first began to examine the ways in which black artists reconciled culturally specific subject matter with technology several years ago, during a visit to Renee Stout's studio, where I saw her assemblage Traveling Rootstore #2 (Madame Ching Goes High Tech) (1994-95). Stout's recurring diviner character Madame Ching--who is never seen, but is referred to in her art--has here traded in her cards, cowries, and bowls for a custom-built laptop, equipped with a keyboard of spells and equations that is surrounded by her magical and medicinal ingredients to summon the spirits and cure the ills of her clientele. Madame Ching has become mobile, and her remedies--depending on the degree of intervention needed--are readily available and almost immediate, like those found on the Internet.

Traveling Rootstore takes contemporary art by black artists to different places by posing a number of new questions: How have black artists used technology to address a cultural heritage that is often believed to be "natural" and vital in expression? When artists blend Western and African-derived subjects and aesthetics, which cultural markers and types from each tradition are preserved? Which ones get uploaded, projected, transported, and transformed? Which are considered Western and which are considered African? And can black artists who work in electronic media escape being reduced to pawns in a debate between magic and machine or roots versus robot?

This forum addresses these incongruous points in the discourse of contemporary African diasporic art, focusing on the contested site of the "black subject"; its intersection with new media; and the transformed relationships among aesthetic traditions, contemporary contexts, and speculative futures.

Michelle-Lee White. Editor at the College Art Association, is also an independent curator and a doctoral candidate in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation analyzes the junction of conceptual-and performance-art aesthetics with the Black Art movement in the United States, ca. 1968-75.

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