bibliography, those that teach me
Advincula, Jake. “Indigenized Internet 🌺.” Are.na.
https://www.are.na/jake-advincula/indigenized-internet.
Indigenized Internet is an are.na board and gathering by Jake Advincula that aims to look at the internet through “indigenous principles of care, connectivity, decentralization, and storytelling.” transgendered bodies. Cheang's use of the multiplicity of digital personas and Advincula explores the internet as a place, drawing upon indigenous knowledges and ways of relating to land/space as a guiding framework. Through the gathering of websites, phrases, imagery, other are.na collections, and personal reflections, this digital space creates space to explore decolonial forms of virtual placemaking.
Technology & Ethos Vol. 2 Book of Life, Imamu Amiri Baraka acknowledges that machines are an extension of their creators and consequently a technology of the West–which also means that we have the ability to liberate the technology we are in relation to. Bakara calls upon the black ethos as a framework for reimagining technology. He imagines that the new technology will continuously work alongside the liberated being to expand spirituality and consciousness; continuously working because it is able to acknowledge change as a constant factor.
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s Resurrection Land, is a playable browser based game that creates a virtual land which serves as a space of rest, remembrance, and resurrection for black trans bodies. The work employs an imagination that denies entry from the white cishetero imagination, creating lands that allow space for black trans bodies, memories, grief, and narratives to be remembered. Buried within the lands, the work begins to speculate what ancestral forms of return and remembrance may look like, and how land can become a space of inheritance for the black trans body.
Shu Lea Cheang’s “one-year narrative project,” Brandon, 1998 is a multimodal artwork that serves as a memorial to Brandon Teena. As one of the earliest web art pieces, Brandon explores cyberspace as a site for disrupting the social structures that inform violence cast upon nonlinear/disruptive interfaces blurs boundaries of bodily identity and pushes back on linear modes of narratives. It becomes a point of convergence for fragmented identity as a result of violence, creating a body of work that refuses a sort of legibility and allows it to move outside of the colonial imagination.
Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism defines the glitch as. In response to the colonial violence of globalization on our bodies (racially, socially, sexually, and economically), the glitch acts as a point of departure from the binary body. The glitch, in its refusal to perform, allows for a queering of our bodies into pluralities that then becomes unrecognizable to the system. Referencing Muños’s disidentifications, Russell explores the AFK vs IRL self, digital avatars, queer temporalities, and how embodying the glitch can become a method for decolonization.
In Making Kin with the Machines Jason Edward Lewis, Noelani Arista, Archer Pechawis, and Suzanne Kite draw upon North American and Oceanic Indigenous epistemologies as framework for rethinking relationships to technology/the nonhuman. They critique the anthropocentric and exploitative nature of western relations to machines–the result of colonialism, slavery, and capitalism. Though this exploitative relationship to technology has shaped much of technological formations, Lewis, Arista, Pechawis and Kite begin to imagine other ways of relating through their personal connections to Hawaiian, Cree, and Lakota epistemologies (respectively). They call upon relations of reciprocity, spirituality, and kinship and begin to bring AI into their circles of relations.
Neema Githere’s inquiry in What is personhood in the digital age? explores our relations to identity as subjects of a colonial empire. They explore how our interpersonal networks have become terrains of currency, algorithms as a ”behavioral modification empire,” and how that has shaped our relations to desire/desirability. Contextualized by their work on afropresentism, they look at technologies such as the web, love, conversations, meditation, and other practices as portals of liberation through the channeling of ancestral relations.
Cyberfeminism Index is an index curated by Mindy Seu that begins to construct and expand the narratives that exist in relation to the radical feminized internet. In reference to Seu’s On Gathering, the index has become a site of convergence for conversation between academic text, techno-activist groups, DIY manuals, net/new media arts, and other forms of internet presence that explores the internet in relation to race, gender, and the sexual body. Its construction, in its nonlinearity, allows for a continued exploration and return.
Mindy Seu’s On Gathering explores the political act of gathering in the context of cyberspace. Influenced by Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction and adrianne marie brown’s Pleasure Activism, Seu approaches cyberspace as an ecosystem where she practices a radical form of gathering. Rather than an extractive, institutional approach to gathering, Seu centers gathering as a communal and cyclical practice, one that invites celebration, intentions of care, and collective toolbuilding.
In A Field Guide to Living on the Internet Vera reflects on the Khasi community in Meghalaya, India and their relationship to the Indian rubber trees. Living communally with the trees, the Khasi people have connected their villages through growing root bridges. Vera then uses this epistemology to contextualize our relation to the internet–how can we tend to the internet as a living being? What practices have roots that would allow it to flourish, and how can we be in a relation of reciprocity with the internet and all that live amongst?
Decentralized storytelling, from Native tradition to the metaverse is an interview with Amelia Winger-Bearskin where she explores her relationship to storytelling as a member of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation. She explores the practices of decentralized storytelling that she grew up around, centered around storytelling as a way of living; stories were spoken, embedded in landscapes, in song, in baskets and beadwork, in handcraft, and in design. Applying this technology of storytelling, Winger-Bearskin then examines the technologies she knows, identifying parallels in digital (play) spaces that parallel decentralized storytelling