Digital shamanism (or blackness as digital technology)
Black Portraitures V l October 19, 2019 l New York University
Conference paper presented at the fifth edition of “Black Portraitures,” an internationally-known interdisciplinary conference on Black visual studies: https://www.blackportraitures.info/
Paper abstract: Digital shamanism (or blackness as digital technology)
This paper looks at articulations of blackness, polytemporality, and digital diaspora in the work of three artists working in (web-based and installation-based) digital media: Tabita Rezaire, Sondra Perry, and Fatimah Tuggar. All three artists use notions of diaspora and diasporic consciousness to reconceptualize the very nature of the digital, positing in their work an essential relationship between blackness, its representation, non-linear time, collective memory, collective healing, and digital media. In the interest of time, my presentation will treat these questions in compressed form through an exposition of two videos by Tabita Rezaire, a Danish-French Guyanese artist now based in Johannesburg. Rezaire understands her work as having the capacity to heal, in part through the ongoing forms of temporal as well as spatial manipulation that produce and reproduce diaspora, and she explicitly refers to her work as a form of “digital shamanism.” Panel on “New Media, Techno, Archive, and Art.”