PLUME Issue 4: Adopt/Resist

PLUME

Adopt/Resist

Featuring: Lynne Avadenka, Sally Clegg, Predrag Nikolic & Diana “Mother Cyborg” Nucera

Contents

The Town With One Side

Faculty Research

S. Clegg

AI.R

Taletorium

Process

Anomaly

Resources

PLUME is a publication by the College for Creative Studies Library connecting community to information.

It aims to disrupt linear research models by offering a uniquely interconnected approach to resources stemming from one single conceptual point.

Faculty Research

P. Nikolic

Interview

L. Avadenka

Article

D. Nucera

List CCS Library

PLUME is headquartered in Detroit, Michigan and was established in 2021.

201 E. Kirby Street Detroit, Michigan 48202

313.664.7642 library@ccsdetroit.edu

Cover photo courtesy of Diana Nucera. “Landscapes of Potential” - D. Nucera, 2022. Quilt, Collection of The LOVE Building.

Editor’s Note

The discourse surrounding technology and its impact is often colored by the concept of newness. It can feel as though we are hurtling forward along an everevolving continuum of incremental improvements and refinements. This trajectory evokes contradictory feelings, depending on your particular bent. Notions of boundless potential and skeptical resistance live side by side as we navigate an era defined by rapid change.

As uncharted as this moment may feel, it is not an unprecedented one. The technological advancements of our age are rooted in history. Our reactions to new tools today are echoes of technologies now seen as foregone conclusions - it is not difficult to trace the creation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT to the invention of the printing press, or to find parallels in how both technologies were received in their time. In considering this lineage, the distinctions between new and traditional, digital and analog, adoption and resistance,

begin to blend and intersect. Artists and designers often live comfortably within this intersection, complicating the dichotomy by envisioning technologies as both medium and subject.

In this issue of PLUME, we will explore this lineage of traditional and new technologies in art and design, placing a spotlight on how makers are mindfully incorporating, resisting, and interacting with available technologies in their practice. Alongside a curation of digital and print library resources, readers can expect to hear from voices within the CCS community as well as the larger ecosystem of Detroit artists. In this way we hope to present a spectrum of perspectives that consider and challenge our perceptions of how technology is situated within the act of creating.

“Self Portrait (Dear Michael and Margaret)” - S. Clegg, 2023. Screen print on cloth, polyfil, thread, 15”x7”x4”.

T he Town With One Side

Sally Clegg

The Town With One Side is an in-progress project that I began during a 2021 residency at the Studios at Mass MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. While conducting local and family research, I learned that my great-great-grandfather had been a textile worker at Arnold Print Works, the factory that now houses the museum. Beginning in 1892, Arnold Print Works produced some of the earliest stuffed toys: most famously, lithographic prints on fabric of cats and rabbits that were meant to be cut out and sewn into three-sided plush dolls.

With this discovery, I saw key ingredients of a new project coming together: a neat mixture of personal and institutional history, a specific form (2D patterns for 3D toys) straddling my two favorite media (print and sculpture), and a conceptual territory (comfort objects) that has been my obsession for the past several years. My discovery also suggested a new area of research: global manufacturing and labor around the turn of the 20th century, including the development, implementation, and eventual relocation of the technology that mass-produced these prints. As a printmaker, my interest in technology is neither nostalgic nor cutting edge; I am most intrigued by the currents of obsolescence that move the latter category into the former over time, just as certain printing machinery has shifted

from being a means of production in one region to another, sometimes ending up in artists’ studios.

My vision of a seamless project was a mirage that soon dissipated. My genealogical research hit dead ends - the family members I’m seeking out left very few records, and the factory housing they lived in appears to have been demolished to build a highway overpass in the 1950s, part of an urban renewal initiative that also included demolition of one side of North Adams’ Main Street. Further, reading about the toys produced by Arnold Print Works and similar companies, the concept of the whimsical and benign “comfort object” also evaporated as I learned about other patterns that they sold, which included soldiers, women, and comic book characters, but also racist brand mascots and caricatures. In step with other toys, books, and advertisements of the time, they provide a visual cross-section of ignorant and hateful social currents in America. Yet unlike other areas of popular culture that aggregated and reproduced such imagery, these patterns also act in part as metaphors for themselves; by design, they involve a profound flattening and distortion of the figure. While each pattern is intended to take form when sewn together and filled, the 2D pieces were arranged and printed on a flat

plane, a condition of the machinery that produced them.

Problematizing my historically naive notion of the “comfort object” was one step towards a fuller project that is the opposite of elegant or seamless; in fact, the presence of seams - and misalignments - in assembling my research and creating artworks has emerged as a main theme. My research has also led me to deeper inquiry and reflection about the power of images-cum-objects, the sometimes surreal, grotesque, and arbitrary ways that the dominant culture is tapped for product development and profit, and the continuing role of technology in dictating the form, number, and reach of printed matter.

Self portraiture is one of my core methods for entering into projects that do not immediately reveal to me the imagery they should contain. So, to begin my studio production for The Town With One Side, I put a nude self portrait through my own process of pattern-making. Self Portrait (Dear Michael and Margaret) (screen print on fabric, 2023) is the first piece in a series of sculptures that will explore the processes and technologies that facilitate the flattening of complex forms and concepts, and those which allow for the application or transformation - through printing, wrapping, and projection - of imagery into/onto 3D objects. To create this piece, I built a rig for photographing an object or figure from three sides at once: front, back, and underside. Referencing and distorting these photos, I handpainted transparencies for a three-color

screen print, which I editioned on fabric, cut out, stuffed, and sewed. The lighting conditions of the photography rig, and the limitations of the pattern-making process I deployed, both resulted in odd effects when the piece was sewn together. The text, which takes the place (in traditional patterns) of titles and sewing instructions, is intended as an incantation for guidance directed at my North Adams forebears.

As a printmaker and moldmaker, processes of reproduction/replication and the unique aura of multiples have always been tantalizing to me, but I had not meaningfully considered this interest in relation to industrial history until my current project. The next area to explore, as I see it, will be the concept of sidedness - in stories, in geometry and topology, in art history’s interest in dimensional categorization of form - as I continue to use sculpture and print to process my research and relationship to North Adams - or, as it is known to me, the town with one side.

Sally Clegg is an artist, writer, and educator from Pelham, Massachusetts. Clegg holds an MFA in Art from The University of Michigan Stamps School of Art & Design, and a BA in Art & English from Goucher College. She is currently an Adjunct Faculty member at the College for Creative Studies.

www.sallyclegg.com

@sally.clegg

“Self Portrait (Dear Michael and Margaret)” - S. Clegg, 2023. Screen print on cloth, polyfil, thread, 15”x7”x4.” Open edition (14).

References:

Abbott, E. A. (1995). Flatland: A romance of many dimensions. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/ ebooks/201 (Original work published 1884)

Fournier, L. (2021). Autotheory as feminist practice in art, writing, and criticism. The MIT Press.

Hall, A. J. (1926). Textile bleaching, dyeing, printing and finishing machinery. Van Nostrand Co. http://books.google.com/ books?id=9tnNAAAAMAAJ

Urban Renewal. (n.d.). North Adams Memories. Retrieved August 24, 2023, from https://sites.williams.edu/hist371-16s/ sample-page/urban-renewal/

Walker, F., & Whitton, M. (1973). Playthings by the yard: The story of cloth dolls

References:

Chen, T., Li, M., Li, Y., Lin, M., Wang, M., Xiao, T., Xu, B., Zhang, C., & Zhang, Z. (2015). MXNet: A flexible and efficient machine learning library heterogeneous distributed systems. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1512.01274

Christy, K. R., & Fox, J. (2016, April). Transportability and presence as predictors of avatar identification within narrative video games. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 283-287. https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2015.0474

Gupta, K., & Chandraker, M. (2020). Neural mesh flow 3D manifold mesh generation via diffeomorphic flows. arXiv. https:// doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2007.10973

Hu, W., Liu, B., Gomes, J., Zitnik, M., Liang, P., Pande, V., & Leskovec, J. (2019). Strategies for pre-training graph neural networks. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1905.12265

Huang, G., Liu, Z., van der Maaten, L., & Weinberger, K. Q. (2017). Densely connected convolutional networks. 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Honolulu, HI, USA, 2261-2269. https://doi.org/10.1109/ CVPR.2017.243

Full reference list available at https://raco.cat/index.php/Artnodes/article/view/n31-nikolic

Photo Courtesy of Predrag Nikolic

A I. R Taletorium

Dr. Predrag Nikolic & Giacomo Bertin (University of Padua, Italy)

AI.R Taletorium is an artificial intelligencebased collaborative storytelling system that offers children with inclusive needs an opportunity to experience a remote, interactive, AI fairy tale storytelling experience while actively involving them in creating stories with their normal peers. The system is designed to achieve a common creative experience between groups of users with specific preferences at different or the same locations. In this project, we are prototyping the concept of Artificial Intelligence Reality (AI.R) as a novel reality paradigm designed with robot creativity and artificial intelligence processed data collected via sensors and cameras from the environment. Besides textual datasets and visual data analyses, we use users’ facial features as inputs for AI to create authentic fairy tales. The new reality is where users are immersed through their avatar characters and the real-time content they draw into the storyline. We are using artificial intelligence, facial characteristics, computer vision, and playful collaboration to provoke positive social interactions between children and help develop social and communication skills in the early stage, improving their imagination and social competencies. We are proposing technology based on human-machine co-creation, AI facial recognition, GPT-2 neural network, AI RNN sketch recognition, and AI visualization model for an automatical generation of fairy tales. The system operates online in real-time. Upon invitation, users can invite more participants to join the process of

creating fairy tales or start a new one. The AI agent also creates dynamic illustrations of the generated storyline and allows the user to draw additional objects or characters that are promptly integrated into the story.

Our platform’s key novelty is using artificial intelligence and a rule-based system to conceptualize and direct fairy tales created by a trained AI storytelling agent. The system operates online and in real time. Upon invitation, users can invite more participants to make fairy tales or start a new one. The AI agent also creates dynamic illustrations of the generated storyline and allows users to interact with objects or characters that are integrated into the story afterward. The system offers a collective, entertaining, and imaginative experience without location and time limitations, helping children stay together, improving their psychological health, and creatively collaborating even under extreme circumstances such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

The AI.R Taletorium project was presented at the International Symposium of Electronica Arts (ISEA) Barcelona in 2022. It was published as a full research paper titled “AI.R Taletorium: Artificial Intelligence 1001 Cyber Nights” in Artnodes Journal in 2023.

Dr. Predrag Nikolic is an experimental designer, interactive media artist, and digital media expert. He currently chairs the User Experience Design MA and MFA programs at the College for Creative Studies.

www.predragnikolic.com

P rocess

Lynne Avadenka

Community is at the heart of Signal-Return, a nonprofit organization which fosters a supportive space for artists to learn, work, and build connections. Representing a diverse group of over 60 artists, SignalReturn offers a platform for artists to sell their work, with a focus on printmaking, a medium that allows for working and selling in multiple.

In a notable project, “On Press: Prints for Nonprofits,” Signal-Return collaborated with 24 artists, each of whom chose a nonprofit organization to benefit from the sales of their limited edition prints. The project was selected for a show at the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), “Printmaking in the 21st Century,” and one of each work was added to the permanent collection. The prints were also exhibited at the Scarab Club and Birmingham Unitarian Church. This sort of concrete support of artists is a testament to the commitment of Signal-Return to their mission.

While the design world grapples with questions about what AI means for the future and the near immediate outputs it can offer, printmaking rewards a slow, deliberate process. Signal-Return’s name, expressing the act of sending a signal through print and hoping for its return, parallels the format of new technology in AI in which a user prompts an AI model to return a result. But there is a sense of patient

discipline in the idea of printmaking as a tool for communicating a message in an artwork. The message is crafted by the artist’s hands and received by human eyes; there is a tangible exchange. The artists working at Signal-Return may not be overtly resisting the digital realm so much as they are embracing the physical and the material, with all of its quirks, challenges, and rewards. We sat down for a conversation with Signal-Return Director Lynne Avadenka to explore the ethos behind the organization’s mission.

PLUME: How would you describe your relationship with the Detroit community?

Lynne: I think that’s who we’re here for. I mean we really want artists to come in and use the space, to be able to make their own imagery, but created in multiple. These people are painters, muralists, they’re mostly 2D. A lot of them, their work, you know, they weren’t really connected to the idea of working in multiple. But the idea that you can have an idea that’s originally yours, put it on a block and print it in multiple, means you reach a bigger audience just by the numbers of the prints that you make. So we’re trying to really help people think that through in their own artistic practice, and come in here and use our stuff. That’s why we’re here.

Photo Courtesy of Lynne Avadenka

“Artists,who are part visionaries and let’s see what we part scavengers, said, can do with these things.”

We started a project that was during COVID, right when it was sort of okay to be together but outside and with masks. It was called “We Exchange” and we invited six visual artists and six literary artists to work collaboratively. [It was] kind of inspired by a quote by Octavia Butler about change, “All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change,” and the idea of exquisite corpse, the surrealist game where somebody would make a head, they would shut the paper and pass it on and someone would have to do the next part of the body, and so on, and so on. In the end, there were three phases to this project. We paired a writer with a visual artist and they had to create work inspired by each other’s work. So the idea is to make prints, to make art, and then get it out in the world by working in multiple.

We did this project [that] started right after George Floyd’s murder. People here were out in the streets and we were closed [because of] COVID. So, two people that were part of the team at the time came up with the idea of making protest posters for folks. We set up a portal on the website and people could send us eight-word maximum messages. At first we were printing twenty copies for free for everybody, and then we put them outside. That was a project that really served the community-at-large, not just artists - we saw our posters everywhere in the community and we kept it open until very recently. People during elections

wanted posters, when Roe v. Wade got overturned there were reproductive health rights posters that people wanted to make, so that was another way I think we serve the community.

P: Could you tell us about the history of the organization?

L: It did have a connection to CCS at the beginning, when Imre Molnar was the dean. He had come from [Art Center], and they have an incredible print shop, and so Imre thought it would be important to have that at CCS. Then over time this became its own separate entity. We’re a nonprofit, which means we’re largely funded by grants and individual contributions, we’re sort of hybrid. Sale of the works, workshop fees, support all of this. A Signal-Return founder who had the idea for this place saw a print shop in Nashville called Hatch Show Print, it’s one of the oldest letterpress shops. It’s now in the same building as the Country Music Hall of Fame, so they have builtin customers. But the idea here was, what can we do, and how can we bring people in to work in community [so that] they’re talking to each other and working together.

P: With education being a large part of the work of Signal-Return, what do you think is the significance of sharing this older medium with the community?

L: Well I think for one thing, it gives

historical context to people studying graphic design and typography. Even some of the terminology that people use in Photoshop comes from this technology. It sort of gets people away from the screen, so they have to physically pick out the letters to make the message. A lot of people are like, “so can I set type on a curve?” Yes, it will take you hours, you will have to find lead, you will have to curve the lead, you will have to find the right type size that will go on. It brings a new appreciation for what they’re working with in the computer, so I think that’s really important.

P: What role would you say technology has in the work here?

L: We don’t ignore it. It’s kind of ironic that we’re teaching a technology that started in the 1450s, but we have a website [laughter]. We use the computer for paying our bills, you know we’re not Luddites, in that sense. There is actually a way to use [the computer] in tandem with letterpress - there are some people that are like, “I’m not doing this, it just takes too long,” so there’s a way to work in a computer design program, like Illustrator or InDesign, to design text or design imagery and then have that made into a plastic printing plate. So it gives you both, it gives you the ease of the computer, but the beauty of sort of a textured, recessed look - that plate goes into the paper just like a piece of type would. There are a lot of people now that are designing typefaces

and then using a CNC router to cut out the letters, so wood type has gotten this whole resurgence because people are like, “Whoa, I can make my own, and then I can cut it and print with it.” There are some really interesting exchanges between technologies that we’ve seen, and there’s some 3D printed plates that have come through here. Yeah, we’re not ignoring it.

P: Do you think, is there some kind of fundamental difference between new technologies, digital technologies, that people are using now, and what’s going on here? I know you said there’s a lot of crossover and interplay happening.

L: Yeah, to me this feels direct. To me, putting ink on paper is just really, totally satisfying. The way it looks, the way it sits on the paper, or the way it gets printed. Some things that are digital are really beautiful but also really flat, so it’s just apples and oranges. If you’re a good artist, you can make anything sing.

P: What do you think it means to preserve a craft?

L: I guess it’s probably not enough to preserve a craft - I’ve seen over the last couple of years, there are a lot of museums that have gathered up some really beautiful type, but they’re not printing with it. So it becomes like a museum artifact. In our mission we say we’re preserving and teaching traditional

letterpress printing. We want to make sure the people are using all of this, you know, to make their message or to make their mark.

P: What role do you think artists play in challenging new technology or moving it forward?

L: I think that’s what artists are always all about. These presses that we have are called proof presses, and they were used in industry to take a proof. So people would come with some type setup, or some form, and they would bring it there to proof it - to make sure that they liked the design, to make sure that everything was spelled right, and then they would go to high-speed presses that printed the same way but printed a lot faster. When offset lithography came to the fore in the late 50s-60s, these presses were just left to die. And of course, artists, who are part visionaries, and part scavengers, said, “let’s see what we can do with these things.” Then there became this whole resurgence, which is still ongoing, in using these printing presses for fine art, for limited edition books, for posters. So we kind of use what’s at hand, and we don’t ignore technology. You have to find the idea, and then the medium that’s the best to express the idea.

www.signalreturnpress.org

@signalreturn

Lynne Avadenka is the Director of SignalReturn, a community letterpress shop and nonprofit founded in 2011, newly located on Detroit’s East Side.

A Digital ID Handbook: Strategies for Navigating Electronic Identification Systems

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Pedagogy of the Oppressed

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From Point to Pixel: A Genealogy of Digital Aesthetics

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Photo Courtesy of Diana Nucera

A nomaly

Diana Nucera

“There’s this double edged sword…it’s like we’re fearful of these [technologies] that are completely integrated in our lives. That should not be the case. We should be controlling those. We should be shaping them, you know, or at least taking what is given to us and repurposing them for our own liberation.”

Inhabiting the space where art, technology, and community organizing interact, artist and educator Diana Nucera (she/they) has long focused on making technology accessible. For her, the principles of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed are fundamental tenets of her practice. Rather than acting as the arbiter of information, Nucera understands herself as collaborating with viewers of her work to construct knowledge.

“I feel like all of my work from [the] past to now is just trying to…create spaces that allow people to find themselves or each other and specifically find their agency,” Nucera said. “Pedagogy, I think, is at the heart of everything. Community learning really taught me what the phrase ‘teach and learn together’ means. So often we go towards just teaching, but these things happen simultaneously in one space.”

With Mimi Onuoha, Nucera has co-written several zines focused on pedagogy and technology that are more like interactive

workbooks than purveyors of top-down knowledge. The research embodied in the zines feeds her creative practice, and, combined with her drive to make digital concepts more broadly accessible, manifests in a new series: fabric quilts. Although a seemingly drastic change from her earlier forms of artistic expression, she sees the quilts as a way to access diverse spaces with viewers who might not encounter her zines.

Blankets, quilts; these are everyday items, well-known and recognizable, flexible enough to wrap around your shoulders and envelop you in an intimate way. How is this meaning changed when the textile wrapped around you is imbued with markers of the digital? These tactile objects, intended to evoke a sense of comfort and familiarity, become a bridge to understanding the digital landscape.

Mestizos404: this massive quilt is what started the series. Against a white background with rows of triangles, the numbers 404 (in shocking pink) are perched in the middle, atop more triangles and stripes. The triangles are vibrant, made of traditional Mexican textiles seen most commonly in the Midwest in tourist pieces. Yet this is intentionally ironic; Nucera is not Mexican, she is Colombian, and the 404 is personal.

“Above the border, we’re all Mexican,” according to Nucera. “It was interesting to have to adopt Black and Mexican culture because Colombian culture [wasn’t acknowledged] where I was….404 is the protocol on the Internet – the information you’re seeking is available, however, you don’t have access to it. And [that rang true] with me when it came to family and identity.”

Her mother’s immigration story from Colombia is harrowing and intense, yet Nucera does not know all the details. The 404 error here, then, is for her personal history. Abstract though her quilts are, they are in the tradition of molas (traditional Central and South American textiles that convey a narrative). Her quilts weave together her personal history with a visual representation of universal digital systems, encouraging viewers to step outside of themselves to take in the whole digital landscape rather than a small piece of it.

Recruited to Detroit by Allied Media Projects for media-based organizing after studying interdisciplinary art and technology for her bachelor’s degree at the San Francisco Art Institute and then her master’s at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Nucera has consistently focused on participatory community events. Sites of reciprocal learning, these happenings allow people to explore their own understanding of the world, particularly the digital realm. In her early digital activism in Detroit, this manifested as DiscoTechs (short for Discovering Technology) - technological makerspaces

for the community. For these happenings, she deconstructed computers and other hardware, allowing attendees to handle the components. In this way, she sought to eliminate barriers around technology.

“[The DiscoTechs were] all about taking apart these computers and letting people touch the chips, because…if you feel like you can assemble this yourself and you’re not afraid of it, then you can take ownership of it and start to rebuild it,” Nucera said. “I think throughout my career, it’s been about figuring out how to give people the tools to rebuild what we have for their own needs.”

Sometimes, though, the raw material for rebuilding does not already exist within the community. In the digital landscape of bankruptcy-era Detroit, Nucera saw parallels with the conditions that gave rise to the Citizenship Schools in the South during desegregation. To combat the mandatory literacy tests imposed on Black Southerners seeking to vote, civil rights activists formed literacy and citizenship schools to teach Black citizens to read using the United States Constitution.

“I’m really inspired by the Citizenship Schools and was unpacking that because I was like, okay, we are in the same place. But instead of reading literacy, it’s digital literacy,” Nucera said. “Detroit was the third least connected city in the United States, with 40% of people without internet as of 2013.”

With the Citizenship Schools as her

“These anomalies are where we have power. is much more Your self-determination powerful than any algorithm.”

“Mestizos404” - D. Nucera, 2020. Quilt, 72”x84”.

inspiration, Nucera, then Director of the Detroit Community Technology Project and responsible for the Equitable Internet Initiative, helped integrate Detroit communities into the digital landscape by installing internet service providers (ISPs) in communities that had been left behind.

“I’m constantly trying to figure out what systems we can work on together and build our own, you know?” Nucera said. “It’s so fascinating to me when people are able to build something together, how much [that act can] change. It’s not just individual; [it] ripples into a neighborhood, a city…what we needed to know was how to build [the ISP networks] ourselves…[Technologists] could have come in and built it themselves and got it done four years sooner, but what do we change at that point? As an activist or a facilitator and educator, even as an artist, you have to understand what is needed for the moment. Once you figure out your role within the community and serve that, then you have the ability to see the role of your community in the larger picture of the universe.”

Nucera identified Digital Stewardsprimarily Black Detroiters, often female - in three districts and trained them how to create their own ISPs, an act she refers to as “un-conditioning their [formal] education.” She installed Wi-Fi hubs in central community locations, and the Digital Stewards connected local residents to the hubs through in-home routers.

In 2019, Nucera stepped away from the Detroit Community Technology Project to

devote herself to her personal creative practice. Her transition away from the Equitable Internet Initiative has involved many stages, including DJing and creating futuristic music videos as Mother Cyborg, yet the past two years have been devoted to her analog quilts as expressions of the digital ecosystem.

These quilts, quite literally, reveal the building blocks of the systems in which we are embedded - using fabric, Nucera breaks these systems into boxes and binary code. Since Mestizos404, her quilts have become more regimented: geometric forms, often cubes, combine in complicated yet orderly ways underneath a wave of iridescent ones and zeroesrepresenting binary code - cut from ironon vinyl. With their bold, vibrant neons and the shiny, opalescent code, her quilts encourage viewers to contemplate their agency and actively involve themselves in deciding what digital traces their lives will leave.

“This is new work looking at organized chaos,” Nucera said. “It’s coming off of the data stream stuff. Thinking about [how]...life turns into the forms of data for the future, which I’m just so fascinated by because I’m like, well, this next gen is going to know so much about us. So for me, the boxes in my work - which you’ll see emerge throughout…my work ’til now - kind of represent containment or… categorization, but also [our] identity…I think liberation and freedom come with that knowledge of one’s self…the work is finding the root of the problem and then

figuring out how to work collectively to address that. And as simple as it sounds, it’s incredibly complex considering…the systems we’re stuck in.”

Echoes of the earlier DiscoTechs are visible in her community quilting bees - not just workshops on quilting techniques, these sessions serve as cathartic expressions of concern about the digital environment. The first hour of the 2021 quilting workshop, DATA CRIMINALIZATION QUILTING BEE, hosted at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, was not spent sewing - it was discussing the seemingly omnipresent digital world, particularly the technological elements that are intrusive and often frightening; participants wondered if their phones were listening to and tracking them.

Expressions of confusion and worries related to the digital - “You have choice!” “Data traps” “Falls through the cracks” - were written by attendees on fabric squares, then embellished and sewn together. Nucera subsequently joined these blocks to create a quilted narrative of our perception of the digital. The inconsistencies of the writing, sewing, and style, due to the numerous contributors to the quilt’s individual elements, embody a core belief: all of her quilts contain purposeful imperfections.

“[Although] we’re literally stuck in [these systems]...there are anomalies and these anomalies are where we have power,” Nucera says. “Your self-determination is much more powerful than any algorithm.

And that’s sort of the message of that quilt...by showing the power structures through the abstract [yet] familiar mediums of quilting and craft, [viewers have] the opportunity to place themselves within that [structure] and then find their own power.”

Why quilts though?

“It became a deep dive into figuring out how to create an analog story for the digital world,” Nucera said. “And why an analog story? Well, there are a lot of Luddites out there, and [they] are the most susceptible to data extraction and…disinformation. It showed me [that you have to] remove yourself from tech to talk about tech in a way that’s more universal. [If] you talk about tech [using] tech, it becomes about that tech. So if I’m making a website about something, it becomes about the website and the internet. But the quilt can hold so much more. It…could talk about legacy, it could talk about family, could talk about personal stuff. It talks to the past as well as…the future. And that feels to me like such a beautiful opportunity.”

www.mothercyborg.com @mothercyborg

Diana Nucera is an interdisciplinary artist based in Detroit who has worked for more than twenty years as a musician, technologist, community organizer, and educator, sometimes under the moniker Mother Cyborg.

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Artificial Whiteness: Politics and Ideology in Artificial Intelligence

Y. Katz

Q334.7 .K38 2020

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Citizen Media

‘23

T. Ingold

C. McIlwain

M. Baker, et al.

GN33 .I48 2011

P94.5.A37 M35 2020

Handmade Nation: The Rise of DIY, Art, Craft, and Design

F. Levine & C. Heimerl

TT23 .L487 2008

HM881 .R68 2021

Choosing Craft: The Artist’s Viewpoint

V. Halper & D. Douglas

TT23 .C56 2009

Digital

A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age

Z. Papacharissi eBook

Making Trouble: Design and Material Activism

O. von Busch eBook

Relating to Things: Design, Technology and the Artificial

H. Wiltse eBook

Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs

K. Crawford eBook

Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need

S. Costanza-Chock eBook

Designing HumanCentric AI Experiences

A. Kore eBook

Queer-Alt-Delete: Glitch Art as Protest Against the Surveillance Cis-Tem

A. Shabbar Article

Understanding Interaction

B. Bongers eBook

Unintentional Intentionality

K. Terzdis, et al. Article

The Influence of Artificial Intelligence on Art Design in the Digital Age

Y. Shen & F. Yu Article