Race and Digital Space

I have used the computer for writing since 1983. I finally became “wired” in the early 1990s. When my eldest son, Myles, majored in Information Technology at the University of California, Berkeley, it also became a learning experience for me—pushing me further into experimentation with new technologies. Wanting to move further into the use of these technologies in my work as a curator and art historian, I delved into developing a project for my class in 2001 while I was a Denise Berin’s Fellow in Art History at Mills College in Oakland, CA. I cannot say that my experience there was a complete success, but all assignments in the course pointed to our final project—a virtual format with images, conversations with artists, and statements on or about the African and Black Diasporas.

The Stanford Humanities Lab Crowds project was more successful. I was invited to participate in this project in 2002. I created an online gallery entitled Jacob Lawrence: Artist as a Face in the Crowd. This project was an eye opener for me to the possibilities of working on the web.

From 2005-2006, as Director of Curatorial Affairs of the new Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco, I became fascinated with MoAD’s use of the web and the concept of web 2.0. (where users drive design and content decisions). Leaving MoAD in April 2006, I worked all summer and fall to develop the Open Door Contemporary Art Projects (OD-CAP) website. Launched in February 2007, OD-CAP is celebrating its one-year anniversary and I am thinking of what we have done and where we will go with the site in the future.

The OD-CAP audience of users is an intimate one and one of OD-CAP’s successes is that it has given its contributors a voice and a sense of community on the web. During 2008, OD-CAP is investigating race and digital space. There have been conferences on this topic and papers given but none has really addressed what I am trying to do with OD-CAP—i.e. offer an alternative space for conversations with and about artists, an alternative venue for exhibiting their work (rather than just pasting up images online), and an interactive visual space much like a “chat room” that is LIVE.

An analysis of OD-CAP users reveals that most users discover the site using key words such as “contemporary art” rather than the “African or Black diaspora” and most users are from North America and Europe. To retool our initial focus, we are adding a subtitle of Crossroads of the African and Black Diasporas and making more use of open source software like Google Maps as a tool to illustrate where the featured artists on OD-CAP are living and working.

So, I’ve decided to invite people who work in digital space who are interested in helping me to address race and digital space on OD-CAP. As I move to broaden our reach to artists outside of the African and Black diasporas, much of what we do will still be directed to that audience of users.

Since our interest at OD-CAP is on art, our contributors have focused on how artists have embraced different digital technologies and how they are getting their work out to larger and crossover audiences that they may not have been able to reach in more traditional museum and gallery exhibition models.

Our goal here is to show how art and technology can and have worked hand in hand, using common and commercial technologies and more complex formats. My knowledge of technology is limited but I respect the advancements in technology and how diverse media is integrated into artists’ works. So these conversations with artists and blogs on OD-CAP are meant to illustrate how Blacks along with the rest of the population have unwittingly embraced varied aspects of digital space through the use of barcodes, cellphones, HDTV, chat rooms, etc. and how artists have accessed those formats in their creative endeavors including digital photography and printing, video, music remixes, etc. Even with the inherent cultural biases in software, youth in lower-income communities have become participants in this digital culture. Many may not have computers in their homes but they have made cellphones work for them in social networking and in creating and editing images with their camera phones. Of course many people have this capability with their phones but if that is the only format that you have then you are more apt to experiment and push the capabilities of that medium—remember scratching on turntables that led to a whole global hip hop nation? Black youth have been more exploratory in the intersection of music and technology and the type of remixes experimented with in music have spilled over into the visuals associated with that music.

So this anniversary edition of OD-CAP brings to light how Black artists across disciplines are using multimedia technologies in their works. In this and subsequent issues, we will consider how graduates with art degrees are creatively merging other careers with art through the use of various technologies.