Black Gooey Universe

American Artist is a part-time faculty member in Design & Technology at Parsons School of Design and a 2020-21 GIDEST Faculty Fellow. Their work as an artist makes use of video, installation, new media, and writing to consider Black labor and visibility within networked life. In their practice they ask: how can understanding systemic racial discrimination as operating “algorithmically” be useful for challenging its various iterations? This thesis has informed several works, most notably the solo exhibition Black Gooey Universe in which the origin of Silicon Valley is contextualized as one of continuing settler colonial violence in the Western United States. The exhibition drew an analogy between the removal of the black background common to early computer interfaces and the erasure and exploitation of racialized individuals in tech and beyond.