Archive

Category: my project

  • Empathy is an Ideology: Or, Who is culturally pathologized by the ideology we call empathy?

    I made a sort of zine-ish thing that are some draft thoughts on Empathy as an ideology. You can read it online here or download it with the link below to print out yourself. If you print it, it needs to be double sided, flip on the short edge, for every page after the first page (the first page is the cover and should be printed alone). With the double sided print you get a short little booklet one you fold the cover and interior pages in half. Details on making your own zine-ish thing and how it can help support course material can be found at the end of the post.

    How To Make Something Like This

    I’ve been exploring the flexibility of Google Slides recently. I’ve created a couple of infographics for work that I can’t publicly share, helped a few people design syllabi, etc etc. So when I decided I wanted to play around with the visual language of a zine using digital tools, I knew there HAD to be something out there. I found it at STL’s Zine Library – Resources & Support. There is a link to a Google Slides Template that you just copy to your google slides and then you are ready to go.

    In order to do this digitally but still get the look and feel I was going for I used a combination of royalty free photographs and clip art that I edited in Photoshop, the Paper App for iPad to create the illustrations and some of the text. As I knew what I wanted to do and had a sense of the copy I was able to get this done over a weekend.

    I do projects like this to help me untangle my thoughts, and I think in certain courses working with different formats is good for students too. If you are a google slides campus (my current institution is), it is an easy way to take advantage of the affordance of the platform. And if students don’t have and iPad and apple pencil, all of this can be done on paper, photographed with cell phones, and then added to the slide deck. If it is done in a course this would be a candidate for a collaborative project/concept study guide where groups put together a very short digital “zine” on an assigned concept that can then be shared with the whole course.

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  • Empathy and The New Mission (decolonizing empathy)

    Still reading and writing but wanted to share a draft of a part of where I am and how I am framing some thoughts.

    On the surface letting of empathy may seem like a bad thing. To the contrary, to let go of empathy is to allow a new space of meaningful and positive spaces. Rather than trying to feel the pain of others, allow space for critical or deep listening. Do not try to enter the crisis, or be the person. Instead listen, observe, be with. There is nothing special about being with another nor is any suffering exceptional unless the work is done to make it so. The lull of oppression defines colonization but it is invisible as long as some feel it acutely and others less so. Often when people are able to point to the more oppressed, rather than understanding their own suffering, they empathize with those who are allowed no other story. Occasionally they come up with plans to help or speak for these wretched or damned people so that they might have a bit more (but never everything and never equal). And when that fails, there is pointing “at least we are not as bad off as them. They must really deserve it.”

    Empathy is already its own failure because it is the embodiment of a colonial sentimentality based on missionary thinking. It is a reimagining of the civilizing mission in an ever increasingly electrically mediated world. Letting go empathy should be central to any decolonial project, especially as we need to work across difference to imagine and create new worlds. Empathy, on the other hand, is the birth, death, and pain of the life of the Other all experienced simultaneously. The turn away from radical activism to radical empathy is an emptying out of direct action in exchange for a return to a European sentimentality that recenters the self as the only space of critical engagement. Further, the Other, unfeeling and unreal as birthed and killed through empathy, is imagined to be incapable of a critical awareness of the self because the Other is too clouded by their own imagined tragic past to through which everything is filtered. Empathy disregards actual interactions with the Other and disables the possibility for a dialogue where the Other can provide a perspective, comparison. This lack of dialogue is a pre-foreclosure of the possibility of mutual recognition.

    If the only version of an other person that can be seen is the one that can be imagined and felt inside of themselves, many others will always be invisible, a passing curiosity, or less than human. Feelings are fickle and easily changed when trying to connect to the unrecognizable through avatars of the self. Rather than understanding decolonization as a political project of undoing, I understand it to be a project of what can become. In that sense, letting go of empathy and facing its other side, is a decolonial project. Understanding decolonization as an orientation towards the future complicates empathy as empathy creates a false engagement with the past that concurrently erases the present and denies those who are not part of the existing power structures, those who are only real through empathy, the ability to be part of the future. This is an enforced affective incompleteness for those who exist outside of dominant power structures. Decolonization and time, primarily as informed by Frantz Fanon, are central frameworks for my understanding the other side of empathy. I do not have an answer to how we might replace empathy though. What I do have is a provocation on the temporality bound in colonial ideals of goodness and badness, of missions, and almost humans, where we might imagine what might become if we replace understanding and connection through feeling, or empathy, with mutual recognition, action, and perhaps compassion. Without a compassion based on a radical transcendent self-love, to let go of empathy does not stop the self-alienation and annihilation so central to colonial thinking that is designed to launch people into an existential crisis that requires the Other so that the self can be defined, valued, and grounded in the past and present colonial structure of power and difference.

    To be oriented towards the decolonial requires that a thing be grounded present and the future. Decolonial dialectics (Ciccariello-Maher 2017) requires a very specific emptying of the past in order to become a yet-to-be defined new. It requires an acknowledgment that certain people denied their humanity, move through the world as a vast emptiness that takes up space in order for white supremacy and other colonial systems of power and oppression to be maintained. It requires that time is given and not given to certain bodies to define what it means to be whole. Time is essential to maintaining existing power structures as people are taken and kept out of time. The statement, “These people are backwards” refers not to a spatial location of people, but rather, denotes a temporal orientation that implies an aspect or the whole of a person or group has not stayed in time with the dominant mode of progress. Empathy then is an inherently colonial phenomenon as it tries to tie the ontological present to an imagined past through mind or psychic control that feels like embodiment which then defines and creates the future. Even further, empathy allows for the other stay as the invisible other side as the Other’s existence is ignored. The Other’s value and life are imagined into reality by those in power to ensure their continued oppression or exclusion, even as the imagined life in no way corresponds with reality. In empathy, the other is re-Objectified and voiceless to ensure the Other can either be ignored, saved, or condemned not by themselves but those who have the liberty of their imagination becoming reality by birthright. It is important to note that empathy came about in America as psychologists attempted to figure out what to call the psychology of imagination in the early 20th century (Lanzoni 2018). This means that empathy is predicated on the ability to imagine some other thing or just the Other. It in no way is tied to realness, and thus, is the space where a thing is brought into being by the previous experiences, stories, beliefs, and rituals that already exist in a given culture.

    Works Cited:

    • Ciccariello-Maher, George. Decolonizing dialectics. Duke University Press, 2017.
    • Fanon, all of it
    • Lanzoni, Susan. Empathy: a Short History. Yale University Press, 2018.

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  • Draft of Empathy Manifesto #1: Emerging Technologies (VR) or Technically Feeling

    I feel you, man.

     

    Because we can never truly know another’s feelings or perspective, it is better that we not feel at all instead of going down the path of self-actualizing at the cost of temporary self-annihilation coupled cannibalization that we have come to call “empathy” across all parts of society tasked with cultural reproduction. That is to say, empathy is an illusion at best or simply, as is said in moments of deep reflection, bullshit!

     

    Here is the list of things I know to be true (which should not be confused with Truth) about empathy:

    1. Feelings and emotions are chemical pollution of the brain that cloud accuracy of experience.
    2. Reaching radical empathy is to have successfully dehumanized.
    3. Empathy leaves the other stuck in time and place.
    4. You are my Other… and I too am yours does not mean WE ARE THE SAME.
    5. Mediated experiences and the empathy they *inspire* is an illusion.
    6. To be in the shoes of an Other still leaves you with your own feet.
    7. Empathy is deployed and used politically as though it is pure transference or communication.
    8. Respect, Compassion, Mutual Recognition, and Assumptions are better frameworks.
    9. Your irrational feelings are my murder and you cannot empathize with the dead.
    10. The body having empathetic sensations is the body seduced and overwhelmed by its own feelings.
    11. Empathy = DEHUMANIZATION and ALIENATION (first of the Other and then of the Self)

     

    The disenfranchised, the marginalized, the at-risk are expected to perform their pain and discomfort for those who know only comfort. Those who know only comfort do not realize they sit in a position of privilege and power. Rather than trying to step into the discomfort of others, people should learn to confront, interrogate, and be aware of their own discomfort (preferably with a smile) because empathy is empty.

     

    Empathy Manifesto #1: Emerging Technologies or Technically Feeling

     

    Look at our emerging technologies! The circulating belief that the ability to see someone as human, to empathize, only if you can inhabit their body as espoused by current emerging virtual reality technology is a reaffirmation that the white male body is the universal body. The version of the “Other” created by the white male gaze and desire is a pitiful and incomplete, incapable of experiencing joy and happiness. The human, reduced and converted to experience then ejected from their body is actualized as a “thing” to temporarily inhabit but never encounter. This lack of encounter and human connection, executed as narratives of trauma, for the purpose of creating empathy for a select few means that the relatives and descendants of those reduced to experience will never exist beyond the virtually real trauma of their kinfolk.

     

    Questions Arise:

     

    • What does it mean to design empathy in an experiencer or viewer of some mediated experience?
    • What becomes of users and creators when their own bodies start  to disappear as they take on the bodies of others, bodies that render other humans into consumable nuggets of suffering?

     

    This is what is being sold with the current push for “affordable” virtual reality technology being positioned as the next and most world-changing emerging technology. These technologies are new methods of emotional control through the false connection known as empathy. They control by increasing distance between people due to the false sense suppressing the self that happens with overstimulation due to the ever-increasing high fidelity and definition of our technologies. It is no wonder that after going through the mediation of electronic machines the experience feels like an increased connection to some Other, be it people or experience. The connection electronic mediation creates is false and this dilemma is not new. Look to history! When technology is deployed in uneven power relationships (both real and potential, but never imagined) at a societal level and as a central component of how the world is designed the empathy shaped morality becomes the foundation of multigenerational trauma. “Moral” empathy imprisons people in the events they survive and the places they are imagined to occupy or were born.

     

    Yet empathy is seen only as a grave danger for the empathizers who understand “them” through the pain of these events or places (because “they” are incapable of joy). Understand them from and through place (because “they” cannot exist here with you; “they” are always far away). Feel “it” in you because they are not human (“they” are pain and place). “They” are an extension of that which you can never be (because you are good/well, and you belong). “They” are not human (“they” do not belong with you). “They”, the dehumanized, are incapable of dreams and joys of their own because they are the carriers of the pain you cannot face/acknowledge. “They” are less than other. “They” are an experience to be consumed and regurgitated as if it is your own. “They” are technology. A virtual reality. A skin that can augment your experience. A skin that can be quickly removed. A skin that is not real. “They” are a skin you put on because you are skinless.

    [with thanks to MinneWebCon for so many amazing conversations post-keynote and people who read early bits and pieces of my jumbled thoughts that are still in draft mode]

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  • Dissertation Abstract #remixthediss

    After the wonderful panel yesterday, I had some people ask for more details on what I’m doing. Here is an abstract:

    Historical glitch: Understanding digital media through the photographic lens, explores the intersecting media ecologies of social media, digital heritage content, and culture. Specifically, this project focuses closely on what a digital project that takes advantages of the formal changes inherent in the shift from analog to digital media looks like. The project highlights how social media can be used as platforms for change and also looks at their limits and potentials for knowledge and culture when such media are used to construct alternate historical narratives. The case study for this project, Vintageblackbeauty, which was digitally born on the social networking site Tumblr, puts digital tools into practice by disseminating historical photographs of black women in their everyday lives from across the black diaspora. The effects of this experiment are theoretically understood through the works of Fanon, Hurston, and McLuhan. Additionally, a digital performance piece that analyzes the effects of this practice, informed by Dada art practices, puts the theoretical implications into motion by placing the digitized photographs gathered on Vintageblackbeauty in conversation with media from the same time periods. Through exploring this ecology, I posit that we can gain a better understanding of some of the differences between digital and analog media, their different potentials for change, as well as the inherent limits they pose. While digital media do allow for greater access and dissemination, they are still tied to a screened experience and held to ethical standards determined by various stakeholders who are often ephemeral or evolving and in contradiction with how we have been trained to conceive of knowledge production.

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  • Meditations on Photography and Digital Media

    I’m currently working on two things for two courses(my Duke 21st century literacies course, and a required course in my home department) that have me asking myself why I am doing what I am doing. These things are also demanding that I explain my reasons. This post is my mini-through experiment as I start thinking through why I’ve made the choices I’ve made.

    DISCLAIMER: You are about to read un-edited thoughts. You have been warned.

    While I suggest that the medium of both photography and the digital is light, the way light is used between the two is very different. The message of the photographic medium is stoppage while the message of the digital medium is movement. McLuhan maintained that as new media come into being we will see them cannibalize the older media they are enhancing and/or replace. We have seen this with photography. The movement of photography from being experienced on a piece of metal or paper that might be tarnished or fade over time, to a screen made of moving pixels that contain the illusion of an infinite number of both still and moving images becomes a great playground for understanding what the big changes of digital media are. Specifically, the changes on our environment, expectations, and ways of knowing are most fascinating for me. Further, because both photography and digital media are understood for their memory storage capabilities popularly, and epistemologically they are seen as information storage and processing devices that go above the capabilities of humans on their own, the importance of understanding the move from stillness to movement becomes more important. When we begin to think about it in relation to speed, where photography is still and the digital is movement at light speed, we can begin to get a glimpse of the new potentials that are built into the medium as well as the accidents.

    Another difference of the digital versus photography brought on by movement is when things move they can turn into different types of waves.* As such, even though at a base level photography and social media are both light, digital can move between moving images and sound, and can be rendered through seamless dots of color and through sound processors that turn the patterns in the light stream into sound. We can push this so far with our current technology that we can take digitized photographs and turn them into soundwaves. I’ve included a tutorial above that shows a program that does this. Someday when I’m not a poor grad student maybe I’ll be able to purchase the program. I would say 3d rendering is new, but I am not sure it is because of stereographs.

    *pseudo-scientific I know, but let’s go with it.

    Also of interest: How to Turn a Paper Image of a Record Into a Beautiful Music
    http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/smartnews/2013/04/how-to-turn-a-paper-image-of-a-record-into-a-beautiful-music/#ixzz2PzDiP7wm

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  • Trigger Warning Project / Playing with @mozilla Popcorn Maker

    It’s been about a month since I made my initial post on the Trigger Warning that appeared on Sociological Images.  Since then, they’ve posted another post with the exact same trigger warning and issue.  It has been very generative for me to experience this.  I am working through what it means to face oppression the way that we do.  I think I am almost comfortable with my thoughts on it, which is good because I have a final presentation/performance thing for my last performance studies course ever on December 7th and that is what I wrote/am writing on.  This is what I’ve come up with so far (aka iteration/draft 1) for my digital installation:

    I might play with it a bit more… I might even try to play with popcorn.js, but I am happy with where it is.  Popcorn Maker was easy to use.  Working through this  allowed me to let go of that second post.  I think I don’t need to comment on it. But I will add it to the list of things that make me shake my head and push me to do my project.

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  • The Whisper Room #tweetasound


    The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago has a Whispering Gallery. It is a 40 foot long sroom covered in metal. The thing is, when you stand at one end, you can whisper the quietest whisper you can manage, and the person at the other end can HEAR you as though you were speaking right into their ear. That moment when you realize that your little voice has made it to the other side, because the other side replies and you experience what happened to them when they heard your whisper, is a moment of glee. And then you keep doing it until other people show up because even though you may have heard that voice before, you know get to hear it as breath, a whisper, loud and clear. Digital media, for me is like that whisper. There is loud talking about what it means to be black and what it means to be a black woman and what the black experience is supposed to feel like, look like, sound like, taste like, etc. that we have a hard time letting it just be. When I say be, I mean it in terms of being a state of becoming.

    Ghana 1881/1895
    Ghana 1881/1895

    Digital media is the place where I can’t see the other side of the whisper room, but I know it is there. I hear the whispers that make their way to me, across time and space, through cables (as light, yay fiber optics!). Digital media is the space where I can find a photograph and post it with the whisper “did you know she was this beautiful?” and I can hear back “she really is”. And while yes, she might be and/or represent all those things that define the black experience, in fact, I may be even placing her as “the Black Woman” at that moment of whisper, we are allowed to just see her and see that yes, she was, is, and will always be beautiful. And we are allowed to see her and say yes, she is and will always be, like me.

    I go into my project knowing it is not a critical mass project. However, I know how whispers affect feeling and how seeing affects world making. My only hope is that by sharing these photographs of women who were here before us, I help keep their images in mind. Having that image creates a new world. This is, of course, the moment when things move from media to performance.

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  • Looking at History vs. Looking at the Past

    This post brought to you from the confines of my humanistic little heart.

    I am in the midst of an interesting internal debate with external consequences. I think I don’t like History.  I am also so/so on history. Actually, I am probably currently rejecting any kind of historical derivative as well. Despite this, I am in love with the idea of looking at the past.

    This line of thought started a while ago, but came to a head with the following image.

    (I created a mini-project around the recent conversation/thoughts I’ve had and am having about this photo: http://jadedid.com/cameroon/)

    Here is what is happening. History feels like myth to me. There are too many (w)holes and the narratives are to totalizing for my comfort level. I was speaking to someone about my project, and they said that they can never see the image in a photograph as separate from the history the photograph was created in. This meant that any photograph of black people they see are read as part of a horrible historical narrative regardless to the image in the photograph. [I am thinking of photograph as the thing and image as the read because it is easier than explaining Barthes].  This meant that, for said person, black people in the United States had no existence outside of the confines of a History of (violent) slavery.  And, as this person was a black American, their existence was also articulated by slavery.  I acknowledge that the legacy of slavery still exists in our social structures.  However, that is not all black people are, nor has it ever been.  If this is what history is doing to people, I don’t want it.  But I knew this.  I have major issues with the type/time (I wrote time initially when I meant to write type, but I think it works too. Yay Freudian slip) of empathy historical narratives of trauma create. I have a whole map of this system that I was not going to include in my dissertation (I was using it as a way to keep the work I am doing on track), but now I think I have to because I do not want this reaction.  Nor do I want to be pulled back into the space of everyone always only being an agent of history.

    There is quote that I commonly see attributed to Harriet Tubman that I thought of as I was going through all of this. I have no idea if it was really said by her or not, but I get the sentiment of both the speaker and the”not knowing” subjects being conjured.

    I freed a thousand slaves I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.

    So, I move to the past. The hinge of how I think of the historical past is not History, but a temporal separation. I am playing with coevalness and presence, and the freedom that the speed of digital contact gives us. I am not saying we need to end History. I think we need it and it is necessary. I applaud anyone who can spend their life’s work looking at traumatic imagery and narratives. I am thankful they are able to write about it, theorize it, analyze it etc..  I am thankful for those who are out there writing counter narratives and working on understudied H/histories. I am thankful that those people exist, because I can’t do it. And if those people weren’t doing it, I couldn’t do the project I am doing. Histories need to be known.  But we also have to accept that the past for many people was just that.  Many people just lived their lives, just like we are.  That is where I find beauty, at times tinged with sadness. It is beautiful none the less.

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  • How do I poetically transcribe a photo…

    with no story?  She fades into the words of the actions around her photograph. 542 notes, but almost no one leaves words… when they do, I save them.

    Photo #3 Madame, 547 Notes
    “Nosy-Be kvinde” (“Nosy-Be woman”). From the island of Nosy-Be, north west Madagascar.
    date unknown
    [collection] Photographs of the Mission Archives, School of Mission and Theology, Stavanger, Norway, ca.1870-1950

    onbecomesone reblogged and added i like her hair

    outponbail reblogged and added she rocks rough and tough in her afro puffs
    RAAAAGE
    rock on whitcha bad self

    potofgoldoverthedigitalrainbo reblogged and added (in bold italics) speechless, she looks soo flawless

    rudolove reblogged this and added  (in italics) Her hair is amazing.

    divalocity reblogged this and added Beautiful! I love historical photos that display the beauty of the African woman.

    collegekidd reblogged this and added Wonder how she got her hair like that. It’s everything.

    ohtwelve reblogged this and added Haute #naturalhair

    quitefascinating reblogged this and added Her hair is what most fascinates me here… it’s beautiful.

    soshespoke reblogged this and added I want my hair to look like that!

    wrivol reblogged this and added Can I have your hair please, ok, I’ll just silently wish for it. I will have a fro.Soon.

    fromjtoz reblogged this and added That is a pretty sick hairstyle 😉

    thesignsinthestars reblogged this and added the hair, the dress. the hair. the necklace. all wow.

    naturallypolished reblogged this and added She looks like a queen .

    leebasays reblogged this and added It would be nice to know who she is humph!

    yamfu reblogged this and added She’s really fly! Who is she?

    artofkawaii reblogged this and added pretty hair and lady!

    iamridiculousthings reblogged this and added hmph..she looks like erykah badu

    Original Post: http://vintageblackbeauty.tumblr.com/post/8821770092/nosy-be-kvinde-nosy-be-woman-from-the

    ETA Turned it into a project: http://jadedid.com/nosybe

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