Digital Keywords with the DISCO Network Scholars 2023
Transcript cleaned by Kerri Graham

Okay.
Good.
All right.
I just wanted to make sure we didn't forget.
Head into the background, Jeff, you know how to get us if you need us.
Sounds good.
Okay.
Okay.
Yo.
Okay.
Okay.
How you doing, Jeff.
I am doing well.
I am hopefully flying to New York tomorrow assuming that my flights not canceled because everything is covered in a half inch of ice.
Is it for work or are you just going for fun? it's it's Michigan spring break which is bizarrely early. Oh, really, it's spring break off Jesus.
When do you when do you when is the semester over?
April 19.
Is it always as early you know 19th the semesters over. That's right. Week seven of the semester.
We've been going since like New Year's Day basically. Yeah.They call it the winter semester.
So there's a full summer thing, then.
It's a weird separation, they do have a spring summer quarter, but it's mashed together.
It's a quarter system. Yes.
No, not officially.
No, it's the semester system.
No, it's a- we're on semesters.
We just have mystery.
Okay.
Red been told since quarter, but anyway, this could be.
Thank you.
So I think we're going to wait about one or two minutes to get started. Thank you to all of you who have joined us for this second iteration of digital keywords with the disco network fellows.
As I said, we'll get started here in just about two minutes.
Okay.
Thank you.
All right, I think we can go ahead and get started. Thank you to all of you who are joining us for the second iteration of digital keywords with the disco network fellows.
My name is Jeff Nagy I am a disco network postdoctoral fellow based here at the University of Michigan.
And we're very excited to have all of you with us today.
This is part of a disco network lecture series that is presented by the disco network and the digital studies Institute here at the University of Michigan.
And we're going to get started in just a second.
Okay.
So here are just a few guidelines to please follow as we progress through today's events. So the first is that if you have any access or technology related concern or question, please send a q amp a message to Evan.
The second is that if you have a question for our panelists and we certainly hope that you will please share it with us in the q amp a box and you should be receiving some further information about how to do that in the chat right now.
And we will turn to those questions as time allows at the end of this event.
And finally, this is a closed session so we do ask that you respect our panelists privacy by not recording or live tweeting anything that you are about to see or hear
to give you a little bit of background information on the disco network and who we are and what we do.
Disco stands for the digital inquiry speculation collaboration and optimism network. And what we do is we integrate critical humanistic social science and artistic approaches to digital studies, and we foreground questions about the cultural implications
of technology to envision a new anti racist and anti ableist digital future. We're a consortium of five labs at five universities and we are funded generously by the Andrew Mellon Foundation.
You can see here on the screen, the six p eyes that constitute the disco network. So that includes Lisa Nakamura, Ray Fouche, Stephanie Dinkins, Remi Yergeau, Andre Brock, and Catherine Knight Steele, as well of course, as the disco network fellows
some of whom you're about to hear from.
I want to signal to you as well that we have some upcoming disco events that we hope you will find of interest and we hope to see you at the first is mapping the assault on critical race theory with type of Taifha Natalee Alexander that will take place on March
23 at 4pm.
And the second is a series of lightning talks with grad scholars affiliated with the next, the disco network. And that is happening on April 20 at 4pm.
And you can find more information about all these events on our website at disco network.org slash disco hyphen events.
We also invite those of you who are attending right now to get involved with the disco network, we have a couple ways that you can do that.
Anyone who wishes to receive our newsletter can sign up to be a disco network member. You also receive invitations to public events such as our summer Institute and learn about opportunities to participate in our research collective, as well as our working
groups and projects.
And if you're interested in being more deeply involved in discos mission. We also are accepting applications for people to become disco research affiliates, and you can find out more information about both of these
for further involvement on our website at disco network.org slash become a member.
Thank you.
So I'm going to now introduce you to the four disco network fellows that will be sharing some of the research with you today.
I'm going to start by introducing David Adelman, who is a fellow here at the University of Michigan in the digital accessible futures lab, and his research interest center disability encrypt studies with a particular emphasis on disability media studies,
digital disability cultures disability film studies and critical sexuality studies through an interdisciplinary Crip studies and feminist lens, he pursues questions which emerge at the intersection of power, culture, technology, identity, and what
we'll be talking about today, desire.
Next up is Aaron Dial who earned his PhD from North Carolina State University in the communication rhetoric and digital media program, where his expertise is in materialist and digital media studies, digital humanities, black studies and cultural studies
of technology and race.
These areas of expertise inform his research and teaching interests which broadly sketched are effective labor, popular culture, urban spaces and temporal flows, and the nexus between sports and science and technology.
He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the humanities and technical science lab at Purdue University.
Lida Zeitlin-Wu is the Michigan hub curriculum development fellow, and she is a scholar of screen based media and visual culture whose research focuses on the commodification and quantification of sensory experience under global techno capitalism.
Her current book project, Seeing by Numbers, traces how color systems, diagrams, and models that attempt to encompass the full range of human color vision came to play a key role in engineering perception over the course of the 20th century.
She's currently a postdoctoral research fellow here at the University of Michigan, and she's focused here on building out DISCO's curriculum goals.
Finally, Coleman Collins, the fellow at the Future histories Studio at Stony Brook University, is an interdisciplinary artist and writer who explores the ways that small iterative processes can have outsized effects over time.
His work often identifies technological developments and relationships of debt and obligation as the modes to which these processes are enacted.
He lives in New York where he's currently serving as the inaugural DISCO network artist in residence at Stony Brook's future histories studio.
And with that, we're going to kick it off. So each of our four fellows today will give a short talk on a digital keyword of their choosing.
We're going to start with David Adelman, the digital AF fellow here at the University of Michigan who's going to talk to us about desire.
Hello, everyone.
Thank you for the opportunity to present this information. I'm going to start with a short visual description of what I look like as an access practice.
So, I am a white man in a power wheelchair with thick glasses and a shortcut haircut with some curls to it. I like my curls.
As my biography would suggest, as a scholar, I am primarily trained in media studies with an emphasis in critical disability studies, script theory, and disability media studies.
But what do these words mean? Simply put, I investigate the ideological and material manifestations of disability culture across socio-technical systems as an identity category and as a mode of knowing, making, and understanding the world.
To do this, I approach these topics from a feminist Marxist positionality, which emphasizes networks of care or what I prefer to understand as dispositions of care.
At its base, I understand disability as being deeply intertwined with the technological for a variety of reasons, both historically and epistemologically.
For instance, a key move of disability studies is to refrain disability away from a purely medical condition, which can and therefore necessarily must be fixed by the intervention
of the medical technician or doctor who, by virtue of schooling and or access to technology, has been endowed with rarefied expertise.
Yet, even as so much activism is invested in moving beyond this medical model of disability, we can perhaps see why this model is so trenchant in society.
It proposes a particular understanding of body, visuality, and desire, a terrain that I am particularly interested in.
Relatedly, Joel Michael Reynolds names the idea that disability causes pain and suffering and therefore harm an ableist conflation, which in turn is the basis by which society determines which lives are worth living.
So I use desire as a calculus to understand disability outside of a medical model of disability, although importantly not outside of a lived reality of pleasure, pain, and the mundane that many disabled people often experience simultaneously.
My conceptions of disability and technology also extend beyond technologies that are understood as purely medical.
Even as I am continually fascinated by the logic of visualizations which seek to pose and posture disability technologies such as the wheelchair, or breathing vents, or diabetic testing ports as either invisible or stylish luxury items, and sometimes simultaneously so.
And so this is what this slide demonstrates. We have three images. The first, the corner here with the woman in the red dress is of Julianne Mercado who is an Instagram content creator, actress, and model.
And she is modeling in her power wheelchair a adaptive fashion from Tommy Hilfiger.
Then we have Alice Wong, who is wearing a vent and is in her wheelchair in front of a wall. And then lastly we have the diabetic port that I mentioned that is pictured on a conventionally thin and I would argue attractive body since it is so thin and stylized over Levi jeans.
All of these, I argue, are configurations and visualizations of one kind of desire or another.
So disability technology in this way reveals ideological positions about disability which often, unfortunately, are undergirded by the ablest conclusions, as I mentioned earlier, or what Tobin Siebers calls the ideology of ability, which at its base is the preference for able bodiedness for a certain kind of fitness.
I choose this word deliberately and I apply it widely. Fitness in this moment refers simultaneously to the perceived healthiness of any given body or lack thereof, but also refers to the individual's capacity to fit into society.
As a disability studies scholar then, I am preoccupied with our notions of the normal, where they come from, how they operate in society, and how they might be resisted.
As one might imagine, these series of questions have importance outside of medical technology to the infrastructures that undergird our representational tools and the technological flows that support networked media.
Importantly, however, I am just as interested in conceptions of desire as well as normality.
In reconfiguring disability as desirable, one is doing more than making the claim that a disabled life is worth living.
I am also compelled by the reality that for many people, disabled bodies are also desirable bodies in a very materialic, grounded, sensual conception of desire.
Simply put, that disability is sexy. Next slide, please.
So what we see in this slide is a screenshot from the Netflix television show Special, which is all about an exploration of a fictional exploration of a gay man with cerebral palsy.
And on this slide, we see two individuals engaging in penetrative sex. They are both male. One is disabled, although perhaps that is not as readily apparent.
But the idea here is that this is one primary example of the ways in which popular culture, in particular in the past two years, has been particularly invested in visualizing and making creative decisions about identitarian populations such as disability and queer bodies in particular.
But fundamentally, as we look at this screen and this image, it causes me to remember that desire reduces sensation in bodies,
whether in this moment as the moment of sex when you have penetration or when we're looking at movie screen as moviegoers and television watchers.
As Amber Jamila Mooser writes, sensations are simultaneously the condition of existing in a body and the tools we have for making sense of the world.
In recent years, in disability studies, there have been what I would term a phenomenological turn, an increased desire to understand the inextricable relationship between the social and by proxy the technological,
and what we might variously understand as the biological, physiological or embodied experience of disabled individuals.
Importantly, many of the ways in which we experience or understand disability are also deeply situated within the flows and networks of technological infrastructure.
Thus, I'm interested in the ways in which disability is visualized on screens and across network media, as I have shown here.
And in particular, I want to close out with some musings on the internet.
Katie Ellis and Gerald Doggin suggested that the internet is a particularly simultaneous moment or platform that holds great potential for disabled individuals
across personal, political and technological definitions of empowerment, while also acknowledging that for many disabled people, the internet is not naturally accessible.
Thus, we might understand the work of intervening into environments and making them accessible not just as design work understood in the sense of technological standardization,
but rather in making our media more accessible, whatever that means, as it sort of shifts across contexts, bodies and experiences, the work of making access is also world building.
And I want to thank you once again for this opportunity to talk and I look forward to our conversation later.
Wonderful. Thank you, David.
And next I'd like to invite Aaron Dial to share with us his digital keyword algorithm.
Jeff, give me one second to pull my screen up.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay. Hello, everyone. As Jeff said in a gracious introduction, my name is Aaron Dial I'm at the Purdue University's humanities and technical science lab.
The title of this talk is algorithm and my keyword is algorithms. This work is building on what myself and my research partner Margaret Baker who couldn't be here today.
And DJ Charlie Mac will also can also cannot be here today is building on the work we did in person at AOIR so I just want to honor them and say that this project is wouldn't be possible without their help and assistance.
Groove, a tracker channel on a record where the stylist needs to produce sound vibrations pleasurable temporal and technically mediated aesthetics of being in time and interplay of ephemeral sound and material apparatus, the politics of insiders and outsiders folks
live and die in the shadows of the group, how race and technology construct and reconstruct each other. The joy of dance the work of routine the memory, the memory fallacy and depth of history, a burial in systems and institutions algorithmic or otherwise
Is being human still a prerequisite for being an artist, you're open with the question that is in my own journalist Murray Stassen is April 2021 public facing commentary and critique presented this interactive to frame his thoughts on the popularity and existential
fact of Fn Meka the then popular robot rapper. For me though the FN Meka question, while indeed an entry point for this talk directs my thinking, not just on the peculiar singularity of FN Meka's existence, but a collision the past and futures were both the debris and explosion
expose the construct of blackness as prime and original deposit for capitalist extraction.
That is the enduring and elastic wonder and spectacle blackness produce produce threads for which we can bring together through a mind little continuity and rupture emphasizing a web like assemblage of tangents over a singular string of linearity, a material narrative
of black bodies, voices, sounds, and technologies, whose in listen often banal assumption from forms the brutal mise en scene where no one is untouched by the living fiction of race.
Fiction here does not suggest any imaginary-ness adhered to the concept of race, or the personal or the personal and systemic experiences there within its construct.
Rather, it emphasizes race as material fictions made up this, not just that it doesn't matter, but it's just matter that spectral distinctions of black and white are polemics of humanity and brief, the project of whiteness which bestows humanities privilege
profit and essence excluded all those bodies most of them in blackness in order to concretize material pun intended the still elemental link between whiteness and humanity.
The progressive narrative of humanity linked to colonial colonialism intentionally for goals and examination of bodies specifically how these bodies exist and are born and fabricated within a nebulous and capital laden profit generating array of algorithms,
AI and machine learning, as well as the whims and trends of digital platforms. It reifies a narrative of humanity that is defined and all the ways humans go beyond our bodies, such the black body holds white imagination, just as this talk gathers my writing
and thinking in my laptop stores. This script, moreover, the Negro, what Ronald Judy names as a being having no empirical content and empty concept purely an invention of the mind with no way of knowing whether it is objectively real or not, constructs humanity
under the sole dominion of civilized Western European whiteness. In other words, when considering the prospect of being human before reality is reduced to an innocuous encumbrance blackness does when aligned with this thinking occurs at the scale of skin, but also ones and zeros through this humanity matters as a quality of being characterized by tenderness, kindness, compassion, and most relevant to our discussions,
aliveness or animatedness which subsumes bodies all bodies into a colonial project where the world is made white.
The backing company behind the creation of FN Meka's factory new which was led by Anthony Martini, a music executive and Brandon Lee a video game artist before dissolved in August 2022 on the creation of Meka, Martini says not to get off philosophical.
How many artists are just vessels for commercial commercial endeavors.
Think about it, the virtual lightness of an artist, it doesn't get old it doesn't get angry doesn't argue with you. His comments which I imagine were stated in that unmistakable unmistakable timber of techno arrogance, make no effort to hide the real innovation behind
FN Meka, not as artists but as but as technology [inaudible]. FN Meka is a deep fake where the artifice isn't the presentation of reality or authentic personhood, but blackness is being a singular mechanism for the absenting the person.
To quote [inaudible], it is implicitly anti racist, because it is human free.
Better put the objective, the objectivity of it all is the point.
Excuse me, that blackness can or should be extracted to prop up profit concern links it to, to the dehumanizing notions of science and mathematics. Thank you eugenics and physiognomy, but in place of measuring skulls is hit records and infectious danceable
song construction at stake here is undoubtedly freedom, the freedoms of corporation to extract without fear of human consequence to find a never ending always ready willing and able docile surrogate for labor to push aside maybe forever the annoying prospect
of talent acquisition and retention.
For martini humanity represents the exploitative the exploitative and cumbersome levels of labor and modernity. who wants to pay workers when building them is possible?
Moreover, to him the music industry's future and who can access humanities privileges there within balances on a race as a fulcrum. Furthermore, FN Meka, specifically in Factory New, Martini and Lee and the music industry's more general more generally cast
a long shadow redacting humanity of black people aren't makers, they see like other industries the existence of blackness as being computational mathematic computational a mathematical ingredient easily targeted and imitated.
In other words, generations of musical practice that are a shrunk to the infinitesimal and infinite scale of algorithms. The consequence of this is a future where black, black music blooms, just without you know, black people.
As of now, a human voice performs the vocals explains martini, but we are working towards the ability to have a computer come up with and perform its own words, and even collaborate with other computers as co writers, moreover, moreover, their neon pixelated future
posting with 808 and the missing snare black music contemplates a music reality where the ontology of black voices, represents an an charismatic fiction where the voices inability to be truly unique yields the unlimited possibility of profit.
As Nina Sun Eidsheim argues, race as thought to be heard in vocal timber has no essential origin that even when assembling zeros and ones listeners and corporations continue to produce and reify notions of racialized vocal timber, the figure of sound
is a symbolic concept that travels with those who are invested in vocal stereotypes, essentially, more than any singular artists living, virtual, or something in between Factory News innovation goes beyond FN Meka, their hopes were to build and ultimately monetize
a library of vocal fonts in emphatically black scratch the breaker mark the surface to dig scraper tear out or off to erase eliminate cancel or strike out a DJ technique of moving a record or controller back and forth producing unique sound effects known as scratching
to interrupt the groove forms the possibility of the scratch while the scratch unearths the impossibility of the groove. cannon maker and time by binder, defining the inherent digitality of the DJ, always on some new shit always researching always create create digging,
and always network.
Now that we've established a contextual framing of the dynamic potential of black music algorithmic extraction, we can turn our attention to how algorithms are algorithms ruptures the status quo digital bondage, it presents a rupture or scratch the challenges reverses and sometimes stops, if only for a moment
the seemingly inevitable weight the scales of capitalism-capitalism places on the black body. The scratch is an 
interruption. It represents the blended ephemerality and material materiality potential was once noise and undecipherable mangling of operation is now the thesis of genre style consumption.
Also in sending the apparatus and music everything for phonograph the turntable the streaming platform, the scratch through its immediacy establishes, once again, the link between sound and source for black folks and culture, it troubles and re humanizes in the face
of much dehumanization. I might add the joint between technology and humanity, better put the scratch humanize blackness, through the technological disruption through through technological disruption as practice.
The scratch is also an assemblage establish humanity through a network of material technologies and digital platforms, a ring silent without turntables cross faders microphone songs wires mixers computer speakers and headphones.
Therefore as McKittrick states, black is sound is a way of being black and being black is an aurally aesthetic way of life. Here the interplay of impulse and tradition of the momentary and timeless is is essential, swift agile fingers pirouette along vinyl
grooves and always fly brush the dirt off your shoulders transgression and revolt against empires geometric perimeter and until revolution tradition is a vital element in culture but it has little to do with persistent with the persistence of old
forms that is tradition doesn't carry the cracking of age instead more like James Brown drums, turn break beat turn hit turn hit turn sample turn hit again.
Turn that crazy moment when the DJ at Magic City dropped 21 savages verse from no heart over black streets no diggity. It was a movie, if you know you know waveform slide back and forth rhythm sheds the automated linearity of BPM of just hitting the two
and four for glorious discourse scratching syntax is the unpronounceable utterances of machines syntax how the unpronounceable utterance of machines coordinates life within and through the machine as an oasis of meaning in and through exhilarating
beat drop seamless blends and loops or surprising song selection to scratch matters within a clotted desert of nothing and no thing we touch machine and in turn, we are forever touched.
In conclusion, I offer a mix to blend combined unique unite or add as an element or ingredient musical tracks arranged and sequence sometimes rehearse sometimes on the fly to appear as one continuous track our black folks see themselves in the digital story
the sounding and folding and continuity of black history on CP time if you know you know and alternative temporalities non empirical space meta before the lames music about music a living thumping archive.
The mix highlights black culture production from back in the day to now and even beyond, especially beyond the amalgamation of its components or rather the processes of this recombination, as much as it accentuates the individual parts from which it springs, we we weigh these along a scale,
a scale bursting and at times contradictory in opposite
and opposite and oppositional temporality in how the most dope 
DJ sets always
start late, the unending turning of timelines and Tik Tok challenges playlist run times when the cops come knocking and, and that algorithms connect everything connect anything and everything in between, by cultivating and understanding the social political
and ethical implications of our processual and praxis based decisions, algorithms right our algorithms forces a reckoning with black bodies as abstractions operating at the whims of capital how the innocuous appearance of hit records and damp and dance
floors and playlists reckon with the dangers vulnerabilities joys and thrills of sounding in the algorithm.
So that's where I'll end. I love to hear questions and comments in the q and a.
Thank you so much.
Thank you Aaron and this is a good moment to remind everyone in the audience that you do not have to wait until the end to ask a question if you have a question now in your head, you can use the q amp a function to pop it in there.
And we will get to them as soon as the talks conclude.
On that.
Next up is Lida Zeitlin-Wu on color.
Great.
Hi everyone, thanks so much for joining us for the second part of our digital keywords series as Jeff already said my name is  Lida Zeitlin-Wu and I am one of two disco curriculum development fellows, the UM hub, along with one who presented last time
on the keyword myth.
So as you probably know from the various materials promoting this event, my keyword is color and taking out of context and since I don't assume that anyone here is familiar with my work I imagine that one question that crossed your mind was, will she be talking
about color as in race or color as in the abstract color you'd encounter in a painting or on a digital interface. And although this question is a completely reasonable one.
It's phrasing whether intentionally or not actually creates a binary between two different conceptions of color, one in which the word describes an abstract sensory property and another in which it refers to a culturally constructed measure of racial
difference and we see the ways that these two categories really are not mutually exclusive.
In terms of words like colorism right that kind of expose that.
The reality is that there's really no such thing as so called abstract color, which would imagine a world in which it's somehow possible to divorce technology from its socio political context.
And when it comes to standardized color in particular, it turns out that color models like grids have historically been uniquely suited to maintaining hierarchies of racial oppression and I'll return to this.
So today I'd like to use this double valence of color to introduce you to the way I've approached this topic in my own work, as well as what this reframing of color as both race and technology has to offer critical digital studies.
My book project seeing by numbers the long history of digital color tells the story of how something as seemingly individualized and ephemeral as color came to be so closely linked to numerical exactitude and standardization.
From 19th century paint charts to Pantone's color of the year, I trace how modern color standards with their built in cultural biases and technical constraints have come to shape our digital present, and in turn how color has repeatedly been instrumentalized
in the service of corporate capitalism and white supremacy.
Today I'd like to walk you through one configuration of standardized color that has been particularly intertwined with questions of institutional control and racial oppression and that is the color grid or color chart.
The commercial color chart which is a matrix configuration consisting of columns and rows of color swatches on a neutral background and I'll return shortly to this question of white as neutral, emerged as the primary mode of organizing color at the turn of the century
and here what you're looking at is the standard color card of America, which was first created in 1915 mostly for use in the textile industry.
These charts are likely familiar to all of you since they're difficult to get away from in 2023. You might have encountered color charts, picking out paint swatches at the hardware store or when choosing a digital color scheme for your website or event
flyer.
By definition the color grid which catalogs and indexes individual elements by assigning them fixed locations.
It emphasizes edges and boundaries and in doing so, makes visible certain categories while making others invisible by exclusion.
Given this, it shouldn't come as a surprise that the color grid has lent itself to furthering white supremacist ideologies were whiteness is the unmarked colorless norm against which all other racial categories are measured.
And in recent years, as many of us know scholars of digital media and race have pointed to the way in which today's search engines digital filters and facial recognition algorithms are often unable to detect or recognize darker faces or non Western features
having been programmed prototypically white skin tones and facial features as the default.
And so extending this conversation I want to show you how the color grid has played a key role in a longer history of lighting and designing for whiteness across print screen and algorithmic technologies that has been, I think, largely overlooked.
So it's not a coincidence that the rise of so called race science at the turn of the century coincided with the rise of the commercial color chart.
And this overlap has a lot to do with the formation of disciplines like anthropology ethnography and eugenics which was treated as a legitimate field of study at the time.
All of which paid special attention to the classification and ranking of humans by skin color color tables, like what you're looking at from anthropologist Paul Broca's tablet come out from 1879 were quite literally held up to living subjects in an attempt
at racial standardization, and these models, it probably goes without saying, took for granted that whiteness was the default neutral rather than a constructed category with qualities like civilizedness and intelligence decreasing the further away subjects
feared from this ideal.
By the mid 20th century, the quantitative measurement of race via skin color was fully integrated into screen technologies, color photography, television and film relied on reference images known as Shirley cards or China girls, and these were test cards of
conventionally attractive white women despite the asiatic connotations of the name China girl that were used to calibrate so called ideal or normal skin tones.
And these examples point to the ways in which systems of mediation are not only a product of historical conditions informed by racial and gender hierarchies, but have played a key role in naturalizing and perpetuating racial discrimination.
In this way, color technologies don't simply reflect or mimic existing racial norms, but also bring them into being.
And in closing, I want to turn to a contemporary artwork that shows a photographer's attempt to navigate the complex historical relationship between the color grid and scientific racism.
And this is Brazilian artists Angelica Dass' ongoing series humanae.
Since 2012 does has been photographing volunteers from a range of races, genders and ages, compiling their portraits into a multi huge matrix that resembles a commercial color chart.
And as of 2016 she had already photographed 3000 people across 13 countries so what you're seeing is very much just an impartial or sorry incomplete sort of slice of the overall project.
Unclothed and cropped from the shoulders up Dass uses the Pantone matching system to match each person's skin color and she has talked about how she uses the nose as a kind of barometer for skin tone matching, which is interesting.
And after doing that she will then use digital color sampling to color, the background of each portrait the same shade.
So on the one hand, humanity can be viewed potentially as a parody of 19th century race sciences preoccupation with classifying humans by skin color.
The artworks randomized configuration in the sense that there doesn't seem to be any ranking or sorting of people on a spectrum of light to dark, alongside the fact that two people who appear to be of the same race have actually entirely different Pantone numbers
might also push us to see this as a socially progressive commentary on race as a social construct.
But the reality is more complex. Notably the project connects Pantone with it supposedly neutral and unbiased numerical standards to the celebration of racial difference and the flattening of hierarchical models.
And one critic has even applauded Dass' uses of Pantone as a quote safe medium that exists outside of the socio political context of race.
However, if you look closely at the image on the screen, you might notice that all the Pantone labels consists of a string of numbers and a dash followed by the letter C.
If you will go a little more closely you might start to notice a pattern which is that the darker the skin tone, the higher the number.
The lightest skin tone we see here is 39 dash nine see that would be the person who is in the second row, the second from the left, and the darkest appears to be 322 dash one see and that would be the person who is in the first row second from the left.
So then you might ask yourself what is 000 C, which would seem to be the kind of baseline right well surprise, it's white, you might say pure white.
So however much the grid is scrambled then whiteness remains the baseline against which all other skin colors are measured. And not only that, this zero degree whiteness as we might call it is a genetic impossibility with the exception of maybe albinism,
it's a whiteness that not even the whitest white person can achieve. So in its ironically colorblind celebration of diversity and multiculturalism humanities reliance on the decidedly not neutral Pantone matching system actually really
legitimizes the racial science of classifying humans by skin color.
So what's at stake here is that the impulse to view color standards as safe or neutral tools risks perpetuating a long history of racist practices, systemic inequality is baked into the very infrastructures of our digital screens, and these infrastructures
need reimagining only then can we mobilize color as a force for social change. Thank you very much and I look forward to hearing your questions.
Thank you, Lida, and up next, and last of the four we have Coleman Collins on debt and then after that as we just mentioned we will open it up to questions from the audience.
And so, Coleman I will let you take it away.
Hi.
I'm.
Let's see.
Cool.
Um, I'm going to talk about a few things that I've been thinking about.
Let's see, try to see how they connect.
Maybe shared some work in the past about inheritance.
And I'm thinking about inheritance and debt and obligation and how they kind of how they might intersect.
Lately I've been thinking a lot about my grandmother, and what I owe her. This is her.
When she died, we sold her house in New York and split the money three ways.
I spent my portion, mostly on going to art school, which was kind of frivolous.
But I don't have any loans. And, you know, although I didn't talk about it that much when people would bring it up, I felt kind of lucky and also a bit, a bit guilty about having been able to rely on that.
There was also a piece of land in North Carolina, in a small town called Ahoski, which is a kind of.
Well, there's a vacant lot.
And every so often I would go on Google Maps and look at it and kind of go back and forth up and down the street.
I haven't visited it yet, but there's something about inheriting land that feels powerful to me, even though I'm not sure what my connection is with it.
There was also a photo album.
And I feel a bit disconnected from these people, although some of them I can recognize.
This is an uncle of mine.
My father and my uncle in New York, 40s or 50s.
This is my great grandmother.
There was also this other thing in the house that something that a letter that my my grandmother had typed up, and it was like, sort of in dialogue with my great grandmother, and it was called her mother's rules for living.
My great grandmother's a lawyer, Moore Boone Everett.
And my grandmother wrote down all those sort of folk wisdom that that her mother had had told her and that, and that she told us.
So, my great grandmother was sent away when she was young.
She had to plow the crops and work in the fields where her cousins went to school.
And she went to high school for a couple months.
After the crops were harvested and before the spring planting.
So, looking at this document, I was really struck by it because a lot of it is things that my grandmother would tell me, but so much of it had to do with money and saving and avoiding debt.
This is a classic one. If everyone else is doing it, you don't need to do it because there are already too many people doing it.
Never get in trouble because you're following your friends. If you get in trouble because it was what you wanted to do, it would be easier to bear.
Never join any organization besides the church.
Never listen to anyone who tries to convince you that there's a better place in the United States, let that person go there first.
In spite of everything, there's still room in America for success. My grandmother was a great optimist, I think.
Money. You should save half of what you earn, you should never work without saving some of the money you earn, even if it's only $1.
That dollar belongs to you and if you need $1, you don't have to ask anybody for it. You cannot depend on the other person's money.
If you owe a debt and find you can't pay on time, go to the person and let him know before the payment is due and tell the person when you will be able to pay.
The creditor will have more respect for you than if you tried to ignore him or her. And there are these moments here where there's these things crossed out and edited and written back in that I found really touching.
A family. A family sticks together. What hurts one hurts all. A family is only as strong as its weak, its link. You never take advantage of a family member.
And then again, if you owe a family member, pay that person just like you would pay any other person who owes you, who lends you money.
Anyone give you advice on how to break up a marriage, but few people can tell you how to keep a marriage together.
No human being is all bad. You usually see what you look for in a person.
If you finish high school, even at the present time, there's no way you can attend college. If and when the way does open up, you'll go to college much more quickly if you had your high school diploma than if you would if you had to go back to high school to get it.
Take advantage of every opportunity because you never know when a door might open down the road.
There are no unimportant jobs. Idle hands are the devil's workshop.
You owe it to yourself to be the best person you can be.
You cannot respect another person if you don't respect yourself. Children, never brag about your children in public because sometimes people know your child better than you.
Keep your mouth shut and let other people praise your child.
You can't give yourself poor.
Don't associate with anyone who knows less than you and is not trying to improve himself because you cannot learn anything from that person how to do nothing. You can do poorly by yourself.
I think about these often because there's a real kind of like middle class driver ethic embedded in these so much about saving so much about debt so much about self improvement.
A lot of things that I, I can't really connect with, but I recognize them as these kind of things that I inherited as lessons and things that I was taught growing up that stick with me.
This is something about teachers.
And it ends with my home training and discipline has helped me meet the challenges with a more positive attitude. It's helped me respect and appreciate myself and others.
It has enabled me to compete and meet disappointments without defeat.
I'm presently passing on the same information to my grandchildren as I did my own son.
So, in, in finding this letter and finding this book and inheriting the land and inheriting this money I thought a lot of things that were kind of wrapped up for me, and this inheritance was also a sense of debt and a weird sense of guilt that, on the one hand,
having benefited from these lessons or, or whatever the saving but on the other hand, feeling really conflicted about the kinds of messages and sort of
disdain, she held for for people who were too lazy, or, or who were too irresponsible.
And somehow in getting this money, there's this feeling of debt and inheritance, and this money was wrapped up together.
She talks about her mother passing. She vowed to be nicer to the living.
This is something that's totally different, actually, but that that's sort of tangentially related. It's called guilt coin. It's a project that I did last year and I'm returning to now to try to redo it for in a different environment.
It's a thought experiment that explores an intimate relationship between guilt and debt. Funny enough in German the word for guilt and debt is schul.
Schul is, on the one hand, to be the cause of something unpleasant, bad or unfortunate, to be responsible, to have a responsibility for, or it's also the amount of money that someone owes someone else.
And this project is, on the one hand is quantitative and financial but it's also qualitative and affective.
It starts with a sort of this cryptocurrency called guilt coin.
And it's a thought experiment because to believe in it, you have to believe that the coin can reduce your guilt. So when you purchase guilt coin, you're purchasing guilt reduction.
You can go to the website to find out how to purchase it directly.
There was a video in the background.
But the primary part of the piece was that there are guilt consultations where museum goers were prompted to discuss the relationship to guilt and ascertain whether the coin was right for them, whether they should purchase it, whether they had guilt,
whether it needed to be reduced, and if so, how much.
These are the consultations. There's a video in the background.
There's a brochure.
There's a little bit of Rousseau here. People are born free and everyone, everywhere they're consumed by guilt.
It goes on. I don't want to take too much time. So, I thought a lot about this because I'm returning to this now, and I worked with the performers over zoom.
We, because this happened in Vienna, and we went back and forth and each of them developed a consultant persona.
Here's some of the notes from some of the performers and a Google Doc.
This is another performer. They're all kind of like grad students so there was a lot of theoretical talk and thinking about the sort of the gold fetish.
Marx's thought about the gold fetish and then also we went back and forth, talking about who represents what.
And this is the thing about the money fetish, a sort of collective illusion, and how we consider value, how money works, exchange.
And this is my, the last thing I sent them is about who they represent, like, who are they representing in the gallery. Do they represent themselves, me, the Guilt Coin organization?
It's a question about participating in institutions where we find agency, and it's also something that's really part of the structure of the work.
So the last part is, which I'll close with is, we, these are like the kind of receipt, the reset prescriptions sort of for people who came, who came through the four schlag.
And that would give them a little information about what they needed to do or how much guilt they had, how much they needed for purchase.
The consultants wrote the reports in either English or German.
And it was really varied. A lot of people were thinking about inherited guilt after the Holocaust.
A lot of them thought it was their duty to hold on to existential guilt and didn't feel it was appropriate to be told otherwise.
They're interested in a mechanism for reducing guilt.
But, but feelings of guilt might be, might be able to be reduced but they didn't want the guilt itself to be reduced.
We also, but again, there's a lot of different access points. And what was kind of interesting was that when I talked about in the US, I think people kind of assumed like, okay, this is about white guilt specifically.
And in some ways it is about that. But in this case, there are a lot of different access points. So this was someone who had left Syria as a refugee and was working through that kind of existential guilt feeling kind of
lucky as having been an escapee.
And this is, this last one was from someone who I recognize was an acquaintance of mine who was working through a kind of feeling of guilt at having
now been, now is a trans woman, but feeling like they, that she had gained from sexism in, you know, in the life that she had lived as a man previously and working through kind of complicated feelings of that.
So anyway, this is something that I'm returning to and I'm kind of looking at how these relationships between guilt and debt exists and inheritance exists in different parts of my practice. So anyway, thanks.
Thank you, Coleman. And thank you to all four of our panelists today for sharing their work with us. We're going to open it up now for a more free range of conversation. We do already have some questions from the audience.
And is my, oh right, as Kristin reminds everyone in the chat, you can continue to add questions. We will continue taking them for as long as we have time for discussion today.
We have a question. The first one that came in is for David. I might add a little bit to it as is my prerogative as host.
Since it's something I'm also interested in, but I think it's a question that relates not just to David's work, but to perhaps everyone's here.
So the question that came in from the audience is about how you, David, imagine the word desire and how it connects to a related word, perhaps pleasure and its corollary displeasure.
And my twist on this, I suppose, is that you used a phrase that stuck in my head immediately that you were, well, I'm looking back at my notes, just to make sure I get this right.
You're interested in desire as a calculus. And I was very curious about this idea of desire as a calculus.
And especially since, you know, as a once and perhaps always math nerd, you know, calculus is about the infinitesimal, right? It's about the accumulation of tiny changes.
And maybe I was thinking about that too in relation to the kinds of very slight gradations in color that appear in Lida's work, or in relation to the spectral aspects of bodies that appear in Aaron's work.
The way that blackness is abstracted and abstracted and extracted and becomes a sort of spectral commodity.
And two, in relation to Coleman's work, this idea of the infinitesimal as being part of these iterative small processes that somehow flip the switch between quantitative and qualitative change, whether they manifest in guilt or in debt or an inheritance.
So that's my broadening out of it. David, do you want to take the question as written?
Certainly, I think so. It is a rich question. And I will also attempt to address your addendum. Jeff, the degree to which I do successfully, I will leave up to you and to our audience.
But the reason that I am particularly interested in desire is because the notion of desirable disability is specifically linked to activist movements that have appeared online over the last 20 or so years
around disability and particularly around the kinds of people who have traditionally identified as disabled and the affordances of that.
And so that was a very intentional choice on my part and also the question of pleasure. Desire and pleasure are related.
The problem with when you sort of think about pleasure is that much of the historical literature that is rooted in discourse of pleasure is rooted in psychoanalytic theory.
So it is a means of both recognizing that as a possible genealogy, but also reconfiguring and reimagining our relationship to these terms, particularly as it is taken up for political action and for world change.
At the same time, this questionnaire is very astute in the sense that I do not see pleasure or displeasure or desire and undesire or the undesirable as antithetical to one another.
Rather, it is based on context and situation. And so what is incredibly important to remember here is that desire is essentially subjective.
We can make objective declarations about what is good desire versus what is bad desire.
There are some there's some validity to that, but in general, it is incredibly hard to articulate the notion definitively that this desire is good.
This desire is bad because there is a tension here.
There is a reckoning that we have to make with the fact that we are all human beings with complex thoughts and desires.
And so this is sort of I was trying to gesture towards in my presentation that the notion of the turn toward affect and phenomenology and really trying to find ways to communicate the subjective in a way that gets to the nitty gritty, but doesn't overly generalize.
And so then to quickly add on this question of calculus is very much for me, I'm thinking about it diagrammatically, which is to say that I often think in terms of circles and in terms of the relationships between concepts, which are very rarely linear.
And so it's a short work or short sort of signal to my readers, my audience that I am thinking about the interconnectedness of a thing, because as I understand it is related to geometry, which is related to all of the sort of mathematical regressions nature.
So it's a way to think about relationships in more complex ways.
Hopefully I didn't take up too much time with that response, but various.
When you just said diagram, I, for a second didn't understand it in terms of like visual representation of things I thought you're, you're speaking of the sort of like Foucauldian, Deleuzian diagram, which maybe was part of where my question was coming from this idea that, you know, all of you have chosen to talk about things that in one way are very embodied and sort of situated materially in a particular time and place and
that's an important part of the kind of epistemology that you all are in your different ways, leveraging.
But I think all of you are also waiting at something spectral I suppose and that's maybe why I got excited about this idea of desire as a calculus as situating itself at the level of the infinitesimal at the level of the sort of like the spectral side of concepts or bodies
that have their weird third foot in the virtual or something like that. But now I'm just I've switched fully over into theory speak so I'm going to stop talking and and let one of you either ignore my, my prompt or take it up.
And if you choose to ignore we do have another question in the q amp a so we can move on to that if you prefer.
Um, yeah, so I get like this, I see the next two questions are directed at me, I will, I guess try to answer both of them as best as I can. I think they're kind of related.
But I'm assuming the audience can see the questions right. So I don't need to read the question or anything.
That's a good question.
I actually don't know the answer to that question. Evan Do you know the answer to that question.
The audience cannot so if it could be read aloud I think that would help out.
Okay, cool. So yeah, so the first one is from an anonymous attendee Hello anonymous attendee I'm glad you're here.
I thought it was interesting that you respelled algorithm.
That was interesting that you respond algorithm to include the word rhythm. Can you say more about your choice to do that.
How much connection do you see between music melody repetition and the repetitive repetitive repetitiveness that is associated with digital computerization. So, to that point.
Um, so I guess a sort of background of this, of this sort of talk right is, and sort of how this sort of like came to be, is that I am trying to teach myself how to DJ right and I've been really sort of enraptured and sort of kind of mesmerized by, not the, the kind of,
I guess sort of technical performance of DJ, but really the sort of technical practice of just making sure everything works and how sort of the mind of the DJ becomes a sort of very fast moving sort of muscular twitchy sort of algorithm in and of itself.
Right. So, and like so a perfect example of this with the with the regular algorithm, sort of taken this is sort of a very, very sort of rough sort of technical explanation, if you will, right so like for example, if you, if you go into like like Netflix right and like,
I think we've all had this experience, you pick our favorite show. We press play and then we get the little the buffer.
Right, the sort of circle that saying a buffering right and that's frustrating for all of us because we live in a world where technology is supposed to be instant right for me I read the buffer as not a sort of mistake of sort of technical labor, but as a proof
that the technical labor is actually working right. This is the idea that sort of like when a weightlifter sort of is lifting a heavy weight the grunt, right, it is the grunt, like the sort of the grunt of sort of technical exertion with DJ right, you,
you don't really see that especially when it's really really good. Right, like you don't see the mistakes you can't sort of compute the mistakes, amid the sort of sleight of hand of sort of cool cool music and cool technical effects.
So for me the name algorithm sort of centers, one that sort of it's sort of I guess excuse me de-centers, sort of black musical production, especially of the DJ as sort of being this innate thing that black people can do, or whatever like we just sort of
have this rhythm and just boom we pick up turntables and we're, and we're going right, it is sort of speaks to the sort of the sort of repetitive work of becoming the DJ like me right now I'm learning how to do like I said, like,
I see my mistakes all the time. I'm very slow I don't have the muscle memory.
I just don't have the sort of dexterity yet.
Right and sort of algorithm for me is a sort of, I think not so general reminder that sort of that sort of black folks who are creating you using sort of digital platforms and digital technologies and material technologies or whatever are doing the sort
of very algorithmic sort of esque work right this idea of sort of processing and very and very very quick speeds.
And, and, and often on the fly. So I hope that answers that question but that sort of moves me to another question by Paxton Haven Paxton is a grad student from UT Austin.
Hello Paxton how you're doing.
So he says I'm curious if Aaron could expand on the aspect of the theory of algorithm which defines DJs as designers and audiences platforms, not specific question but just want to hear a bit more about what about this connection between designers and platforms
within digital dance music right yeah and so thank you for that question Paxton and to me sort of my work is less about, I guess.
Quote unquote quote unquote sort of endpoint of dance music right i don't think DJ has to be dance music in the sense of like a David Guetta, Tiesto, Calvin Harris type thing, or whatever, like, I don't think it has to be that right but we have to sort of remember
the sort of, I think sort of DJ, even when it happened sort of on the fly, is the work of sort of design right so for me, the Catherine, the Catherine McKittrick quote right, that's what I stated in my talk sort of that sort of being black is about
sort of an aurally aesthetic way of life right and Alexander Whit Haley talks about this in his book phonography.
I think it's great. I'm thinking of a title. But yeah, this idea that sort of blackness and black artistic production has always been digitally made and right and it's actually like, um, black cultural production has always been literally the sounding
board of sort of American sort of angst and sort of reality of dealing with technology, like we go back to jazz sort of with sort of the angst of sort of dealing with sort of industrial train sounds and stuff like that right.
So this idea that sort of DJs are designed and sort of speaks to this sort of idea that sort of DJs, again, aren't doing this sort of by themselves but using other platforms right the platform is not about sort of one technology but how technology interface
right. There are scores of technology that the DJ sort of wheels to use to implement the sounds that we all love right. And this idea sort of audiences platforms right is that sort of, you tend to think of the sort of DJ is the sort of black box, if you will, which
will tell you like some songs hit some songs don't some songs work for certain audiences some songs don't work for for for other audiences right right and understanding that choice and being able to move on the fly and also being able to sort of tell
sort of a story with with music right, but to be able to get an audience to a certain point right so you can build the reaction that you want so the DJ is the agent not sort of totally being reactive to the odds I think it's sort of is about that
hope that answers Paxton, and the other person's question.
I guess there's a question for me in the chat.
So, anonymous attendee says question for Lida. I'm curious about the exploration of different color diagram schemes in your research, alongside Pantone hex codes color sphere hue saturation brightness.
How did these factor into your thinking about new baselines slash non baseline slash construction of baseline.
Wow, I could probably talk about this for days.
So, we try to find a way to like answer this concisely but this is like precisely what I'm interested in exploring in my work with my book project really focuses on these different kinds of diagrams and color standards as a way of thinking through color
as a technology that's been instrumentalized in the service of, you know, corporate capitalism and so on. And so, one of the chapters like does actually really look at when did we start seeing all these charts, it used to be the case in like the 1700s.
And, and earlier that color wheels were a much more prevalent way of thinking about color and visualizing it didn't mean that there were no color grids but very much kind of shifting paradigms and so one of the things that I'm doing throughout the project
is basically tracing a kind of longer genealogy of what we might tend to associate with digital color so qualities that I discussed in my presentation like modularity or numerical representation, kind of the discrete categorizing logic of the grid, and basically
see all these rivaling corporations who say you know I own this standard, like most recently Pantone pulled their colors from Photoshop so now if you try to use Pantone values in Photoshop I think it just shows up as gray.
So, on the one hand it's a question of kind of, you know commodification and intellectual property, but it's also I'm trying to argue a kind of shifting way and seeing the world at large, the idea that when we see color nowadays, there's kind of an understanding
that red isn't really specific enough right it has to be a specific kind of red and so there's actually a way in which color systems like the Munsell color system which was first created in the early 20th century were later adapted and are actually now still the basis
of a lot of the screens that we use today, and there's like a whole history about that.
But in terms of the kind of, we could just call them sort of rival ways of representing color HEX, you know CMYK, HSV and so on. I think one of the things that I find really useful to think about is, like I think there's still a very prevalent understanding
that digital technology should somehow be predictable and exacting when in fact, there's so much room for error, because Aaron was talking about buffering.
So in the case of something like these different color systems, moving between say like RGB and CMYK and so on, there's a lot of room for error and that's what designers call color management.
So when you have something like the dress meme from 2015 where everyone was freaking out because they couldn't understand why they saw black and blue and their friends saw white and gold.
Like I think that was one of those examples that showed that actually moving between these different systems is actually super messy and so I think one of the things I'm trying to point to in my work is that it can be dangerous to see these kinds of numerical
notations and automatically assume this is neutral or this is objective. So I'll stop there but basically yeah there's a lot of, a lot of different kinds of color diagrams that do different things.
There's a question in the Q&A for Coleman, which is about how you can see the distinction between guilt and debt in English and how that differs from the German schul.
And I actually had a question for Coleman too so maybe I'll add my question on to it and it's a question that maybe ropes in some of David's work as well.
So, I was interested in the role that the idea of fetish and fetishization plays in this project Gilcoy and maybe in your work more broadly. So you're talking obviously about the money fetish sort of social illusion of the value of money.
But, you know, in some of your other work fetishes appear, not just as a concept as a source of iconography.
And I'm thinking to maybe about how this, how guilt itself can become an object of fetishization so you talked in a moment I thought was quite interesting about people who did not want to lose their guilt.
They thought it was inappropriate to absolve themselves of it through the purchase of Gilcoy right so they instead they, they held on to it they saw that guilt that sort of existential guilt is itself in some way desirable.
And maybe this is where I'm seeing a potential connection to David's thinking about disability is desirable.
And to maybe something like the way that shame itself can be a sort of uniquely productive affect at least if you think along the lines of someone like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.
So that's, yeah, I, I'm just adding my, my two cents on to this question but I'd be curious to your thoughts.
Oh, sure. Yeah, and I see there's someone else who's mentioning David Graber, who, which is cool because that he was really influential for me.
Well, I think that with regard to fetish, and maybe like a broader, a broader critique of artistic production that is always kind of operating for me. The question of how objects or entities gain value or retain value is really interesting, and, and the sort of social function
of those things, and how, how that those sorts of value judgments, and, you know, hierarchies are ultimately social.
The question about, I mean the thing about shame is really interesting I was reading a lot about, or in in working on this project and returning to it.
There's traditionally like different distinctions made between guilt and shame with with shame having a public function and guilt being a little bit more private and internal.
And with regard to the question that's there about the distinction between guilt and debt in English.
I think that, you know, Graber would argue that, that, that there's like that.
The, the school, the thing with school in German is just a function of, of, of all monetary systems being more or less based on on a conception of debt.
And, and also like that is sort of inescapable.
And, you know, he starts from different types of exchange and different like sort of informal systems of, of like record keeping and and gift giving, and then you know progresses to this.
I think that there's obviously a different, you know, there's not quite.
I obviously there's a there's a certain kind of moral register with with regard to debt in the US, you know, talk about responsibility and people who live beyond their means etc.
It's not quite the same as it is in Germany, and I think, like, you can see that reflected in German bankruptcy laws with, which are like extremely onerous, and, you know, I think a lot about.
I mean, I, in these works I'm really thinking about it on a personal level but I think it's also at the level of a nation state.
The question of that really comes into play and if you like German attitudes towards Greece during the financial crisis, about 10 years ago.
German, there's, I think a particularity to the German relationship to debt and the sense of moral culpability that's tied, tied into it. But, um, you know, I also extend this to.
I also think that there are resonances, when we think about, sort of, I mean in the museum right like the restitution of objects from, from, let's say the global south.
When we think about, like sort of post colonial frameworks and the way that that is either mobilized or, or kind of used as a wedge with like IMF for World Bank and the way that there are these debt traps for developing countries, but also like, I think
these things, I mean, I think there are different gradations in different ways that those that those terms and sort of moral sentiments get mobilized or entangled.
But for me they're really really tied together and that's that's both on a sort of personal level at the level of the nation state that's that's on a financial level but that's also to do with history and kind of thinking about
the way that guild isn't is there's always inherently entangled with both obligation and the possibility for reparation.
So,
I asked, I guess Coleman, a question, it's a question because Ray asked a question about this, that's really to my question but since he was already talking. Okay. Okay.
I guess I'll read Ray's question and ask my question for the folks in the audience. So Ray, that's Ray Bob from Shay.
He asked Coleman How does freedom work in the project and typically the desire for fright for financial freedom for black folks, and sort of my question is about freedom to and about debt and sort of, I wonder if you could sort of hear that question
with the sort of what the other sort of polemic that sort of for the sort of top one of the 1% right dead is actually sort of financial freedom right so how sort of like folks like Elon Musk.
Gates, or whatever right is that sort of like how they move is that they saw everything is through debt loans, right because they just have so much money that sort of dead is actually they are they are freed from the guilt and shame of having to pay back
debt, right, because they, they will always have enough.
So I'm curious how you sort of think about sort of those sort of shifting sort of polemics of freedom around sort of like finance index, because [inaudible] yourself a super interesting.
Yeah, I mean, I think, I think, yeah, that is like really particular right like it, you know, they always say that if you if you owe the bank $100 the bank owns you, if you owe the bank $100 million, then you know the bank right because they're sort
of well being as tied up with yours in a way. And I think that's a really interesting and important point about the way that can that because these people don't obviously don't take like labor income and they're getting everything capital to capital gains,
they use it they're living off of loans in order to forestall like taxes.
I think freedom, you know, when I think about my family and I think about the sort of conservative financial lessons that I kind of was was was brought up with.
It's really tricky you know i think i think on the one hand, I feel sort of indebted to, to the people who gave me those, those lessons, but I also kind of resent the necessity for for that those kind of tools of survival, let's say.
And I think another thing that's that's really, I think, particular about this work is that, and I kind of alluded to earlier, is that I think I want to also leave space for, you know, like there's a certain version of this work that could be mostly
about that could proceed with an assumption that the people who should be guilty or should who experienced guilt are sort of this sort of oppressor other and oftentimes you know people even white people would be like well it's about the elites and Asian people
will be like it's about white people, and you know it would kind of like there was a way that there's a sort of distancing effects.
And I think that sometimes when I've talked about this, particularly among black people. I think I always want to leave space for a certain type of interiority.
And I think, particularly in an art context, because of maybe we might assume that the audience is white, so that the, the idea is that white people are going to come in and then they're going to be made to feel guilty or something.
And that's like the point of the work, but because like kind of, because I don't think of that as my central audience, I'm always thinking about ways that black people and other people who are who are let's say marginalized have these really rich interior
lives with their own kind of things that they're working through right like like it. There's, there's, there's sort of complex kind of psych psychological feelings that people have, in addition to, or that might precede or exceed like feelings of oppression,
or like, or struggle. So, that is also something that I'm really interested in, in leaving the space for access like like a certain type of interiority and a decentering, which is not to say that that the question of racialized guilt, or like, you know, colonialism
and those things aren't at play, but it's really important for me to think about like for people who, like, who, who they are when they're on their own and they're at home, you know, and you know like what are they thinking about and what are the, and how does their
kind of relationship with themselves.
exceed, and it precedes any encounter with whiteness, you know, and it's something that is, I think, I want to kind of leave space for.
And think about, in addition to kind of bringing in that that critique.
So, I don't know if that answers.
All that.
David, did you want to jump in and answer this question from the audience?
So, I, are we talking about the question for me. Yes.
So, I can, I will have a certain amount of minutes left, but I will try to be concise. The conclusion, particularly for me, is a practice.
I know one of the ways in which I experienced desire and others by being verbal in particular ways. So, I will reiterate, the question was about giving a concise definition of critical disability studies.
And so, so for me critical disability studies, it doesn't name any particular method, rather it names an orientation and the politics, right so historically within disability studies, there has been a lot of issue and friction around the notion that disability
studies doesn't mean white disability studies with people like Chris Bell and others, Sami Shaw, Gina B King talking about the ways in which whiteness is often upheld as the only position from which to speak.
And so, critical disability studies seeks to address that by incorporating to the extent that it can intersectionality, and the goals of disability justice which say letting the most minoritized bodies speak and center those bodies and those experiences,
while at the same time, also emphasizing a person oriented approach, and what that means can differ across dollars sometimes ethnographic sometimes action oriented participant research sometimes it is as, in my case, close reading and textual analysis.
If you are curious about the sort of definition lineages of critical disability studies, I would encourage you to look at someone like Sarah Acevedo or Rula Williams, or Nirmala Erevelles, it is a very astute question because often that phrase along with a lot of academic
term gets turned around but at a very basic level, critical disability studies is trying to incorporate intersectionality and disability justice, but of course that's always limited because we exist in a matter which is a corporation.
Academia is a corporation. That's my take for the day. Um, anyway, so yes, I think I've answered.
Well, we said we certainly can't end on academia is a corporation, well we can but you know maybe we'll get in trouble with the University of Michigan here.
Um, but we do have time for maybe one more question and there is one more question in the q amp a for Lida from Ray Fouche.
Do you want to, to read it out or summarize it and then.
Sure, and I'll try my best to be, even though these are these are great questions and very, you know, could spend longer answering them I'll try to be concise so Ray says Lita in the context of color, so it's sort of, it's two related questions.
The first is in the context of color do you say see hue and shading lighting and darkness and their impact on the perception of color.
Challenge our understandings of the nature of color. In part two. Similarly, how does a term like color blindness as a physical condition of color perception, and as a problematic metaphor for racial inclusiveness function project so like to the first question,
I think one of the, the kind of overarching philosophical debates around color that goes back in millennia is like is color form, is it not like what what is color is it based in objects in the world is it based in our subjective perception and so on.
And so one of the reasons color is so notoriously hard to standardize is because of something called color constancy right so the idea that like we know that an object is red, even as the light changes our, our eyes adjust to accommodate that but color systems
just can't do that so they essentially kind of even everything out by having everything be at one uniform level of brightness. So there's already a way in which the standardized color systems that are built into our screens which all come from something
called the CIE chromaticity diagram from like 1931 chromaticity is supposedly an objective quality that separates color value from brightness and that kind of raises this essential question like, is that even still color, if you can separate out these
things and what you're doing is essentially kind of denying the contingency that is associated with something like color colors fade they change and are kind of inseparable from light and external like environmental conditions right.
And so that actually does link to the color blindness question in the sense that in an effort to standardize and normalize color perception in this way, all of these diagrams were initially based on something that came to me known as the standard observer
and that was basically, you know, a set of averages from the psychophysical tests.
And essentially it was, it was a way to kind of figure out like what, how does the average person see color. Well the average person is not colorblind but also doesn't possess sort of unusual visual acuity.
So there's already this question of sort of normalized vision that's built into color systems in addition to these other kinds of normalized identity categories I described earlier and I think there are a lot of really interesting moments where questions
of disability kind of butt up against these questions of color and race that I currently have, I feel like not addressed sufficiently and want to develop more.
So something like historian of science, Michael Rossi has written about the kind of panic around color blindness when it was first kind of pathologized in the 19th century and it was there was this whole rhetoric right around the kind of linear development of
civilization with whiteness as the pinnacle, but then when it was found that the people who are most likely to be colorblind were white men, it became that actually having deficient vision was seen as a sign of civilizedness they were working so hard
to further this narrative white supremacy that actually seeing color worse strangely became a barometer of civilization.
And then as to the kind of color blindness as a way of describing kind of multicultural ideology I think it color continues to be a really powerful rhetoric to talk about race so I, I don't know that I have an answer for that but I do think it's, it's interesting
in that, like Pantone random campaign about 10 years ago for their skin tone guide, and it kind of does something perform something a little bit similar to the artwork I showed where it has all these people from different races, including people who appear
to be white saying, I am a person of color. I am a person of color, and it certainly like has not aged well, but it's like this effort to sort of reclaim color as a label is not racialized that ends up promoting this.
Well, I guess what we would call a colorblind ideology, but I'd like to look more into sort of the correlations between those terms.
That's interesting that these color systems posited like a theoretical sun that shines with equal brightness on everything.
Which is perhaps like the Pantone ideology in a nutshell, in a way, we are at time so I do want to thank all of our panelists for sharing their work with us today, and to thank all of you in the audience for joining.
And we hope to see you again at our future events you can find us on our website disco network.org under the events tab and we hope that some of you will consider being involved with the disco network in a more material fashion, either by applying
to become an affiliate or at least joining our network.
And so with that, I know in a webinar there's always this weird moment where no one can applaud, but thank you all again very much. And goodbye.