IN PROGRESS WORKS
ATTENTION: I'm no longer updating this page.
Instead I'm using Instagram and (occasionally Substack) as my hubs for sharing work updates, research, and installations. Follow me on both of them with the links below:
INSTAGRAM: @thistimeitsmimi
SUBSTACK: No Easy Matters
If / Then / Maybe: An Igbotic Sense of Tech
This image taken from the fantastic Ụ́kpụ́rụ́ blog, a great resource on many pre-colonial Igbo matters.
This forthcoming essay considers the focus on prediction that enables computational systems and the resulting mindset they engender. It then shifts towards considering Igbotic ways of considering change and predictability and the usefulness of such approaches.
Themes: Technology, coloniality, Igbo culture, prediction, computation
Publish Date: Spring 2022
Ground Truths
Original research (historical and present-day data collection), machine learning, site-specific installations
Ground Truths (tentative title) treats the 19th century practice of convict leasing as a means for considering the subterranean as a site of imperial encounter. The project is part original data collection, part statistical machine learning analysis, part historical archiving, and part artwork and installation; it uses technologies of seeming precision to foreground the unknowability of sites laced with histories of life, death, and violence.
Themes: Technology, machine learning, blackness, history, archives, epistemology, prints, photography, art
Collaborator: The Human Rights Data Analysis Group
Projected Completion: 2023
Funding provided by Creative Capital and Mozilla
General Research and Art
Many of the things I work on are at early or private stages. This section contains broad and brief overviews of the work that I'm currently making and thinking about.
Currently Making: Video piece about the process of turning land and nature into data for the agricultural industry.
Moving image work on repetition, modulation, and Blackness [collaboration for Transmediale with Romi Morrison]
Some poems that may or may not ever be shared.
Print/sculpture adapting these maps.
Currently Thinking About: The (powerful and oft-denied) relationship between the natural world and technological development. The interrelatedness of the systems we rely on.
If "ethics" and "bias" are incomplete as frameworks (and refusal is just one form of response), what does it look like to create technology that isn't in the service of the powerful?
Dataset creation as a creative act. Perhaps you can never own a dataset, only be its steward. (To believe this is antithetical to capitalism).
"How does one enter into a critique when the very ground of that critique is being pulled out from under you?" - Zine Magubane
A People's Guide To Tech
An artist-run press that grounds tech education in creativity and social structures
We — Mimi Ọnụọha and Diana Nucera — released A People's Guide To AI in 2017 to fill the gap in publishing for educational content around technology that was accessible, affordable, in pursuit of liberation and grounded in an understanding of present and historical social structures. A People's Guide to Tech extends the model used for that publication. The press aims to explore and explain recent technologies and to give a wide range of groups (young people, seniors, non-techies, rural-based people, and even experts) the opportunity to think critically and creatively about the kinds of futures increasingly digital and automated technologies can bring.
Themes: Pedagogy, artist-run press, popular education, AI, emerging technology
Collaborator: Diana Nucera, aka Mother Cyborg
Projected Launch: June 2022