Yale Critical Computing Initiative Talk:
Black Virtuality: Representation, Embodiment, and the Politics of Digital Blackness
Professor A.M. Darke, UC Santa Cruz
Abstract:
Blackness is always mediated—by the state, by history, by the white gaze. In virtual spaces, this mediation extends to the algorithms, models, and infrastructures that construct, contain, and commodify Black bodies. This talk examines the politics of Black virtuality: how Black digital representation is shaped, constrained, and reimagined through both industry practices and creative intervention.
Through projects like the Open Source Afro Hair Library, which challenges the erasure and misrepresentation of Black hair in 3D design, and For My Next Guest, a virtual talk show that interrogates the digital commodification of Blackness, this talk explores the stakes of embodiment in virtual space. How do we reclaim the digital Black body from the extractive logic of capitalism? What does it mean to construct Blackness on our own terms in a medium that was never designed for us?
Merging creative practice with critical scholarship, this conversation will explore the tensions between visibility and control, between representation and autonomy, and between the Black body as spectacle and as sovereign subject in digital worlds.
Bio:
A.M. Darke is an artist and Associate Professor of Games and New Media at UC Santa Cruz. Through critical games and experimental media, Darke examines Blackness through a technocultural lens. She has won multiple awards for her creative practice in the Arts, as well as her contributions to the simulation of afro-textured hair in computer graphics. Darke is the founder of the Open Source Afro Hair Library, a free resource of assets celebrating Black hair in 3 Dimensions.
Darke has a BA in Design and an MFA in Media Arts, both from UCLA. Her work has been widely exhibited at festivals and galleries around the world, and featured in a variety of publications, such as The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.