Hypermaterial Language Art: Digitality, Materiality, and Contemporary Anti-Racist Poetics sits at the intersection of media archeology, digital humanities, and public rhetoric. Developing a theoretical lens of digitality, the project applies this lens to contemporary artworks across media to excavate the anti-racist poetics in their formal experimentation with language. Reading video installations by Natalie Bookchin, digital narratives by Erik Loyer, photographs by Lorna Simpson, paintings by Glenn Ligon, and poetry by Harryette Mullen, through this lens, I re-frame these works as “hypermaterial language art.” Citing the digital vocabulary of hypermedia, hypertext, and hyperlink to align the linguistic intensity of these artworks with digital poetics, the category “hypermaterial language art” places these texts within an interpretive framework to resist the public rhetoric enforcing colorblind ideologies. I develop this framework and its applicability by placing descriptions of colorblind racism by scholars like Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Jennifer González alongside work describing the materiality and operability of digital technologies by scholars like N. Katherine Hayles and Alexander Galloway.
As described in critical race discourse, colorblind ideologies emerge from rhetorical systems that process systemic racism through logics of disappearance and denial. These logics effectively render systemic racism immaterial, invisible, and illegible; racism is accessible in this environment only as moments of individualized bigotry. Reading these descriptions of racial information processing in a colorblind ideological system, through descriptions of digital information processing in a computational system, I re-frame colorblind ideology as a system of ideological “code processing.” The term “code processing” describes the process by which signals of external input flicker through layers of hardware circuitry and software coding to produce a corresponding output on a digital computer screen. As in the digital informatics system, in the colorblind ideological system, the semiotic information of structural racism is rendered invisible, inaccessible, and illegible to the “colorblind” public. Thus, throughout this project I use the insight provided by discourses of digital materiality as a theoretical lens to engage the politics of the above-named artists’ formal practices, insofar as they track racism’s encoded, colorblind flicker between visibility and invisibility. In its theoretical and discursive use of digital technologies, this lens also provides a theoretical analogue to the primarily practice-based field of digital humanities.
This project is based off of my dissertation, which currently shares the same name. As well it is supported by two peer-reviewed articles: "From Float to Flicker: Information Processing, Racial Semiotics, and Anti-Racist Protest, from 'I Am a Man' to 'Black Lives Matter,' forthcoming in Criticism (vol. 60); and "The Alt-Social Network of Natalie Bookchin's Testament," published July 2017, in Television and New Media (vol. 8, no. 5).
As described in critical race discourse, colorblind ideologies emerge from rhetorical systems that process systemic racism through logics of disappearance and denial. These logics effectively render systemic racism immaterial, invisible, and illegible; racism is accessible in this environment only as moments of individualized bigotry. Reading these descriptions of racial information processing in a colorblind ideological system, through descriptions of digital information processing in a computational system, I re-frame colorblind ideology as a system of ideological “code processing.” The term “code processing” describes the process by which signals of external input flicker through layers of hardware circuitry and software coding to produce a corresponding output on a digital computer screen. As in the digital informatics system, in the colorblind ideological system, the semiotic information of structural racism is rendered invisible, inaccessible, and illegible to the “colorblind” public. Thus, throughout this project I use the insight provided by discourses of digital materiality as a theoretical lens to engage the politics of the above-named artists’ formal practices, insofar as they track racism’s encoded, colorblind flicker between visibility and invisibility. In its theoretical and discursive use of digital technologies, this lens also provides a theoretical analogue to the primarily practice-based field of digital humanities.
This project is based off of my dissertation, which currently shares the same name. As well it is supported by two peer-reviewed articles: "From Float to Flicker: Information Processing, Racial Semiotics, and Anti-Racist Protest, from 'I Am a Man' to 'Black Lives Matter,' forthcoming in Criticism (vol. 60); and "The Alt-Social Network of Natalie Bookchin's Testament," published July 2017, in Television and New Media (vol. 8, no. 5).