The challenge of my specific research was to contextualize race as a dynamic power system that is further manipulated and complicated by hi-tech devices and evolving historical paradigms. The word “race,” at once positional and relational, reflects a variety of cultural realities. In this country, when we employ the term “race,” we tend to think first of the tired dichotomy of blackness and whiteness — that is our default narrative. We may even embrace or reject digital media in the same argument. Yet we linguistically trip over hyphenated terms of identities such as African- and Asian- and situational prefixes such as post-, neo-, and re- in our search for fixed meanings. At the same time, I have come to realize that digital tools can be read, as any texts might be, as representing the particular ideas of their creators, and as articulations of power and authority as well as enablers of creative possibility. As notions about the nature of sound and visual art become embedded into the structure of software-based music and film, interactions with these electronic and digital components reveal characteristics of the communities of thought and culture that produced them. The big news is not how artists use digital tools to create a single aesthetic or cultural stance but how they encourage a plurality of techniques, and how artists use these tools to articulate a variety of stances toward their work and technological media.
Two Approaches to Race in Electrocultures
Artists of African descent have used new-media tools to address their cultural heritage from a variety of perspectives. Philip Mallory Jones was one of the first black new-media artists to articulate afrofuturist themes aggressively.7 For Jones, afrofuturism is a useful space in which to work because it frees him from the “ghettoizing” assumption that “documentary” is a more relevant space for him to operate in: afrofuturism readily encompasses the complex, culturally diverse networks of traditions that influence his body of work. Jones states, We are generally expected to speak about people of color in terms of sociopolitical issues or problems. This limits the scope of our discourse. Representation of African and Diaspora peoples and culture is not necessarily the raison d’être of a work by an artist of color. Portrait artists working in paint and photography, for example, will sometimes use these subjects as a vehicle for exploring the characteristics of the medium. Hopefully, an artist’s work expresses truth, which need not be the same as objective reality. People of color and our culture are well served by the mature and well-crafted work of media artists producing in the full spectrum of genres.8 In experimental video works (some dating to the early 1970s), Jones illuminates a complex global diaspora that originates in Africa but transcends race and ethnicity and that is defined in terms of modes of expression, paradigms of perception, and systems of symbolic communication. In the late 1960s Jones was drawn to video because of an attraction to machines and gadgets, as well as by the appeal of working in what he describes as a “videomatic” medium that he could help define. He was profoundly affected by Jean Cocteau’s film La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast, 1946), which is reflected in his use of surreal and abstract imagery and a dense yet comprehensible complexity that is his video trademark. In the videos Jembe (1989) and Paradigm Shift (1992), Jones transposes African visual motifs and images onto electronic media. In Jembe, vibrant and sensual images, rendered into abstracted electronic color and form, are fused with the dynamic music of Coulibaly Aboubacar. This vivid and impressionistic piece explores the development of codes that are based on what Jones terms “emotional progressions and an African sensorium,” without dependence on a specific language. In lay terms, he is interested in how cultural information can be conveyed subliminally. Jones’s use of morphing, layering, rotoscoping, and computer animation could also be described as anthropopathic; his high-tech surface manipulation of images creates symbolic codes that encourage
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