Untitled (Pulse) (2024)

I was invited to be an artist for BLACK CODE, an exhibition curated by Nzinga Simone at the Atlanta Contemporary. The exhibition highlighted Black contemporary artists making use of emergent technologies in their practice, and complicated the assumed neutrality of digital technologies, reimagining machines into frameworks that function to assert and extend black subjectivity.

Part object and part “performance,” Untitled (Pulse) utilizes 3D printing and live heartbeat data to overtly challenge the notion of tech neutrality.

Presenting as a skeletonized human heart, the frame houses a pulsing luminous core that throws shadows of varying intensity across space. The light bulb’s fluctuations, though seemingly random, are a visual manifestation of my actual pulse, captured and translated in real-time from a networked sensor connected to my body for the duration of the exhibition.

Although the triggers behind the fluctuations captured by the sensor will remain unknown to the audience, the sensor allows Untitled (Pulse) to exist as an embodied entity: a subjective data performance powered by an intimate abstraction of my physical and emotional state to make obvious the human behind the tech, running in parallel with a physical object made by contemporary technologies with lineages to resource extraction and human exploitation – such as the sensor’s own lithium battery, a technology that promises sustainable energy at the cost of the environmental, health, and human toll inflicted on miners in the Congo.

These abstractions attempt to underscore the ever-present human element and impact intrinsically linked to technology, inviting reflection on the prevailing assumption of tech objectivity, the consequences of obscuring humanity from tech, and who slips through the cracks when we uncritically accept technology to be a neutral actor.

Project Acknowledgements

Technical Producer: Sehmon Burnam

Featured: BLACK CODE, for the Atlanta Contemporary’s Winter 2024 Exhibitions