Golan Levin: Tonight we’ll have three pre­sen­ters. At 5:00 PM, now, at Eastern Time, we will hear from A.M. Darke, who has been devel­op­ing the Open Source Afro Hair Library, a fem­i­nist, antiracist data­base for 3D mod­els of Black hair tex­tures and styles. At 5:30 PM, Bomani Oseni McClendon, a mem­ber of a small team devel­op­ing ml5.js, which is a library that aims to make machine learn­ing approach­able for a broad audi­ence of artists, cre­ative coders, and stu­dents. And at 6:00 PM, Valencia James, cre­ator of the Volumetric Performance Toolbox, a soft­ware sys­tem for move­ment artists of all eth­nic­i­ties, cul­tures, and abil­i­ties to cre­ate immer­sive per­for­mances online. 

Our first pre­sen­ter, A.M. Darke, is an artist and gamemak­er design­ing rad­i­cal tools for social inter­ven­tion. Still in the class war. Now in the pan­dem­ic. He’s in the com­bi­na­tion class war and pan­dem­ic. Assistant Professor of Digital Arts and New Media, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, at UC Santa Cruz, Darke also directs The Other Lab, an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary, inter­sec­tion­al fem­i­nist research space for exper­i­men­tal games and new media. She recent­ly launched ​‘Ye or Nay?, a Kanye West-themed game about Black cul­ture, and is cur­rent­ly devel­op­ing the Open Source Afro Hair Library, a 3D mod­el data­base for Black hair­styles and tex­tures. Darke holds a BA in Design and an MFA in Media Arts, both from UCLA. Her work has been shown inter­na­tion­al­ly and fea­tured in a vari­ety of pub­li­ca­tions, includ­ing Kill Screen, Vice, and NPR. A.M. Darke.

A.M. Darke: Hi every­one. Please let me know if I have any audio issues. There’s major con­struc­tion going on right out­side my window. 

Yes, thank you so much Golan for that won­der­ful intro­duc­tion. I’m going to get right into it. I only have twen­ty min­utes and I talk a lot. So, let me get start­ed with the screen share. 

So, every­body can see that. You can see my notes. It’s gonna be a very trans­par­ent talk.

Okay. So, the Open Source Afro Hair Library is what I will be talk­ing about today. My talk does actu­al­ly have a title, and it is ​“Representation Matters: On Black Virtuality and Being Included.” 

So, I want­ed to talk specif­i­cal­ly about visu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion and inclu­siv­i­ty, and real­ly try­ing to prob­lema­tize the way that we con­ceive of inclu­siv­i­ty as an inher­ent good. This is not a sort of ​“hash­tag rep­re­sen­ta­tion mat­ters” talk, it is a talk that’s think­ing about you know, mat­ters around rep­re­sen­ta­tion and how to do that in a way that is non-instrumentalizing and non-exploitative. All of my work is about pow­er and rep­re­sen­ta­tion and iden­ti­ty, and for most of my prac­tice I’ve been focused on sort of what I would say is max­i­miz­ing agency for mar­gin­al­ized bod­ies, usu­al­ly think­ing through my own nar­ra­tive and the exter­nal and inter­nal­ized bar­ri­ers I have faced. 

To be per­fect­ly hon­est, most of my work has been maybe too cel­e­brat­ed by white lib­er­als? And that always makes me feel like I’m not doing enough. And the cur­rent tra­jec­to­ry of my work has moved away from that sort of like, lib­er­al indi­vid­u­al­iza­tion, that sort of indi­vid­ual free­dom, to real­ly try­ing to move beyond rep­re­sen­ta­tion and move into col­lec­tive lib­er­a­to­ry prac­tices. And so I think of the Open Source Afro Hair Library as not just a sort of data­base of Black vir­tu­al­i­ty but also think­ing through decol­o­niz­ing prac­tices and how can I decol­o­nize the design, how can I fos­ter new forms of com­mu­ni­ty. And so I’m gonna talk I’m pret­ty thor­ough­ly about that.

So, first things first. Okay I’m cre­at­ing a data­base of Black hair­styles and tex­tures. But why do I need to do that? How did this project come to be? Like why is this important? 

I want to start by show­ing you some of the research that I start­ed col­lect­ing in 2019, to give you the land­scape of what Black vir­tu­al­i­ty looks like right now. So, I have a fold­er here that’s research I col­lect­ed from CGTrader and TurboSquid. These are 3D asset mar­ket­places where you can buy—sometimes they’re free to down­load but you know, free to down­load or mon­e­tized 3D assets that are cre­at­ed that are sub­mit­ted by indi­vid­ual cre­ators and then sold on this plat­form. And so I’m just gonna pick a few from here. 

So, this is from TurboSquid. Here’s a depic­tion of Blackness that you’d find if you were to search for ​“afro hair” or ​“Black hair.” Right. We’re see­ing these kinds of real­ly gross car­i­ca­tures of Blackness.

Here’s anoth­er image. Immediately, this harkens back to that Jim Crow era of Black car­i­ca­tures. And I found this real­ly dis­con­cert­ing, not only because I was real­ly just look­ing for depic­tions of Blackness, specif­i­cal­ly look­ing for Black hair. But it’s unnerv­ing to me that these kinds of images that oth­er forms of media have long locked away in their vaults and con­sid­ered you know, prob­lem­at­ic and racist are now being repro­duced in this sort of cutting-edge technology. 

So, these are some of the most egre­gious, but in search­ing for Black hair I came across images like… 

This. Not very detailed hair, not very high-quality model. 

Here’s a series of three depic­tions of Blackness. This is ​“Mixed Race Jerry.” As a mixed race per­son, I’m deeply offend­ed by this image. We have…again, this is sup­posed to be a Black per­son. You can look at the details of the hair, does­n’t look like Black hair that I’ve ever seen. 

You also see these sort vague­ly trib­al depic­tions, sim­i­lar to this one. You have things like this. 

Basically if you’re look­ing for depic­tions of Black hair in par­tic­u­lar, you end up with these sort of min­strels or mammys. 

You end up with hyper­sex­u­al­ized depic­tions of women. Here this mod­el’s actu­al­ly …with her braids, but then this woman is bound by rope around the wrists and around the neck. And so all of this I found very problematic. 

Two issues, out­side of the rep­re­sen­ta­tion that I want­ed to talk about was when I was look­ing for Black hair, even enter­ing the search term for Black hair into these sort of data­bas­es became a prob­lem. Because these sys­tems are not designed to think about Blackness in the way that I think about Blackness. When I’m look­ing for Black hair, I’m not look­ing for a sort of col­or descrip­tion, I’m look­ing for some­thing that reads as an eth­nic descrip­tion. And so that was a strug­gle. Even now— I can pull this up. 

So some of this has changed because my work has become more pub­lic. I’ve had peo­ple from these com­pa­nies reach out to me and talk about their aware­ness of my work. But here’s a query for Black hair. You can see we’ve got hors­es, we’ve got this long black wig on a hyper­sex­u­al­ized body. More ani­mals than Black peo­ple. This is very new. This has hap­pened with­in the last year. So not real­ly what I’m look­ing for. So even in this search term look­ing for Black hair, I have to sort of fig­ure out how to make Blackness as an eth­nic descrip­tor legible.

And so I have to…you know, if I search for Afro hair then you get a lit­tle bit clos­er. You see these kind of hair­styles. But again, they’re very lim­it­ed. There’s not much diver­si­ty. Adjacent to these sort of like, inof­fen­sive but not high-quality mod­els you also get things like this: 

…going back to the kind of car­i­ca­tur­ized, very lim­it­ed, nar­row depic­tions of Blackness. 

And so this is the rea­son for the Open Source Afro Hair Library. Not just to sort of con­trol the kind of rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Black vir­tu­al­i­ty, but also to…opt out of these sort of cap­i­tal­ist, cor­po­rate sys­tems, right. You know, even if I were to say well I just want to cre­ate these won­der­ful mod­els, and I want to upload them to these sites, we have anoth­er prob­lem. We have the prob­lem of you know, look how much it costs to pur­chase Bubba, this depic­tion of Black vir­tu­al­i­ty. It’s $160. You’re get­ting a deal. It’s like, dis­count­ed, right? 

But I take issue with the idea of buy­ing and trad­ing Black bod­ies. It reminds me of some­thing. And I don’t real­ly want to engage in that sys­tem whatsoever. 

So instead, I decid­ed that the way to deal with this would be to cre­ate my own web site, col­lab­o­rate with Black 3D artists, pay them, and sup­port them, give the mate­r­i­al and com­mu­ni­ty sup­port to be able to craft our own depic­tions of Blackness. And so I’ve sort of giv­ing you the lay of the land of how things are. Now I want to show you what it looks like when Black artists col­lab­o­rate and are in con­trol of our own depictions. 

So, these are the first images cre­at­ed by a 3D artist named H.D. Harris. This was basi­cal­ly the proof of con­cept. I worked with them, I told them what I was look­ing for. I talked about want­i­ng to com­mis­sion these 3D mod­els that com­mu­ni­cat­ed not just rep­re­sen­ta­tions of Blackness but how do we rep­re­sent queer­ness, how do we have a voice, and how do we put that voice—a rad­i­cal, pro-queer, pro-immigrant, pro-Black, real­ly the antithe­sis of all of the things that I see in these sort of cap­i­tal­ist spaces—how do we cre­ate all of that, just in this visu­al lan­guage of Blackness. And so these were the ini­tial con­cepts. I think they’re absolute­ly stun­ning. And this real­ly kick­start­ed this project. 

So, I’m show­ing you some representation—and I’m going go to my notes so that I remem­ber. Alright, there’s three things that I want to touch on. So, here I’m at the sec­ond part, where I’m talk­ing about expand­ing the Black vir­tu­al imag­i­nary. So, these are some ini­tial images. But I’m gonna real­ly focus the final part of my talk around this prac­tice of col­lab­o­rat­ing with Black artists. 

So after get­ting the sort of proof of con­cept, and apply­ing to some grants, and get­ting some fund­ing, what I did is I devel­oped the Open Source Afro Hair Library 3D artists in res­i­dence fel­low­ship pro­gram. And this is actu­al­ly the very first time I’m run­ning it. It’s hap­pen­ing right now. We’re about half-way through. And I was able to work with an inter­na­tion­al col­lec­tive of artists. We have folks from Kenya, Nigeria, London, Belgium, Oakland, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. And we’re in the process of devel­op­ing these mod­els to seed the library. And I’m gonna talk a lit­tle bit about what this prac­tice looked like. Like why I’m doing this fel­low­ship mod­el. How to really…once again get back to the sort of lib­er­a­to­ry prac­tices, get out­side of representation. 

So in the fel­low­ship mod­el, what we’re doing is cre­at­ing a space for Black artists to come togeth­er out­side of a sort of white gaze, out­side of this exter­nal pres­sure, to be able to have real con­ver­sa­tions about expand­ing Black vir­tu­al­i­ty. The idea of the library is that we don’t sim­ply sort of serve users what they’re look­ing for. You can imag­ine that a tra­di­tion­al web site like this is usu­al­ly looked at as a util­i­ty. Users come to the web site and they search for exact­ly what they’re look­ing for, and the entire idea’s to serve them that result as quick­ly as possible. 

But with the Open Source Afro Hair Library we are mak­ing the pre­sump­tion that we don’t want to serve the user what they’re look­ing for if what they’re look­ing for is lim­it­ed. In the worst case by you know, the sys­temic racism that we’re all entrenched with­in, or just by the lack of beau­ti­ful, sub­lime rep­re­sen­ta­tion. As you could see in some of the images I showed ear­li­er, there isn’t real­ly any­thing that I find to be ele­vat­ed or chal­leng­ing. And so that’s what we’re doing through this fel­low­ship. And I want to give you— This is a sneak peek; this is super secret. No one has seen this. I got some per­mis­sion from the artists to show some of their works in progress. 

So this is what we’re com­ing up with togeth­er when we’re out­side of sort of exter­nal pres­sures. So these are some sketch­es for hair ideas. Every artist has their own artist state­ment. They devel­op their own theme. They devel­op a series of mod­els to work with their own char­ac­ter bust. Here this per­son Cicada is work­ing with myth­i­cal crea­tures and cre­at­ing real­ly love­ly images. There’s some more of those. I’m going to show you a sam­pling here. 

This is H.D. Harris, who’s also doing a fel­low­ship, who cre­at­ed the orig­i­nal images. I believe that their inspi­ra­tion for Blackness is think­ing about hair as tech­nol­o­gy. And so they’re in the mid­dle of devel­op­ing this series, which are just incred­i­bly stun­ning images. 

This is an artist Malika[sp?]. These are some of their ini­tial sketch­es, and so they’re in the process of now mod­el­ing these out. 

And as you can see, we’re nev­er look­ing at— The rea­son why every— So, every artist has to cre­ate this char­ac­ter bust and they design this series of hair­styles. In the Open Source Afro Hair Library we nev­er sort of dis­em­body, we nev­er just take the hair­styles and leave them float­ing. Everything is always pre­sent­ed ful­ly col­orized and with the char­ac­ter mod­el. Because we’re not look­ing to sort of cre­ate these piece­meal ver­sions of Blackness. We are always look­ing at the human. Even in a sort of fic­tion­al con­text, we’re look­ing to cre­ate these depic­tions of Blackness that are whole.

This artist is Timid Clover. This is an ini­tial sketch. Here are some of the images that she’s in the mid­dle of creating. 

This artist is Javon. 

And here are some of Javon’s 3D models. 

So these are the sort of expan­sions of Black vir­tu­al­i­ty that we’re look­ing for and that we’re work­ing with in the library. So I want­ed to show you this. But then I also want­ed to sort of show you the design work. Like how are we going through the process of try­ing to decol­o­nize the nar­ra­tive expe­ri­ence of nav­i­gat­ing this web site. 

So, as Golan intro­duced I do have a design degree. And so there’s been a lot of back­ground work in addi­tion to work­ing with artists and sort of going back and forth with this art direc­tion and col­lab­o­rat­ing with them. I’m work­ing with the web devel­op­er Estevan Carlos Benson, and we have spent months real­ly think­ing about the design sys­tem of the web site itself. Not only elim­i­nat­ing a search fea­ture, but real­ly try­ing to fig­ure out how do we immerse an audi­ence into the space so that it does­n’t become just a resource where you come and sort of extract Blackness and then leave Black cul­ture behind, or you extract these Black mod­els but leave the Black cre­ators behind. 

And so one of the things that we’re pri­or­i­tiz­ing as you can see from a mock­up of our artists page is that every­where where you see a mod­el, you also see the artist equal­ly high­light­ed. I’m draw­ing a lot from the fash­ion indus­try here in terms of the way that I’m think­ing about this design series. …just as impor­tant if not more­so than the objects that they cre­ate, right. The name mat­ters. When a new series is launched, you want to hear what the inspi­ra­tion and the back­sto­ry is from that design­er because you respect them as an artist. 

And I find it you know, fun­ny, that in these tech­no­log­i­cal and soft­ware spaces, 3D artists are actu­al­ly treat­ed much more like gar­ment work­ers in the sense that the peo­ple who are actu­al­ly cre­at­ing these beau­ti­ful objects that are used in all of these appli­ca­tions, their labor is invis­i­b­lized. They’re not seen. What you see is the sort of direc­tor, or pro­duc­er, of a game or a large expe­ri­ence but you’re not see­ing the artists who craft­ed this vision. And so it’s real­ly impor­tant that in cre­at­ing the library my rela­tion­ship with the artist is not just what can you pro­duce for this project or this vision I have, but how are we work­ing togeth­er, how are we plat­form­ing and ampli­fy­ing your vision? How are we basi­cal­ly cre­at­ing the space and sup­port for you to cre­ate depic­tions of Blackness that maybe in a dif­fer­ent con­text you would­n’t have the finan­cial means to do so, or have the time to do so. And so again, ele­vat­ing the artist and nev­er sort of extract­ing their work and leav­ing them behind. 

Also the fact that the… I want to talk a lit­tle bit about why the Hair Library is open source and the sort of lim­i­ta­tions of that. You know, I said that I want­ed to work out­side of a cap­i­tal­ist mod­el and I did­n’t want to engage in the buy­ing and sell­ing of Black bod­ies. And so I thought an open source project would be excel­lent for that where I could pay Black artists to cre­ate these mod­els and then they would be avail­able wide­ly for any kind of use, for both— You know, my ide­al sort of tar­get audi­ence is actu­al­ly a young Black femme who does­n’t even know if they want to make games or if they want to get into soft­ware. Maybe they’re not even look­ing for 3D mod­els. Maybe they’re just search­ing for ways to style all of their wild hair, and they stum­ble upon this web site and they’re just tak­en aback by these amaz­ing depic­tions, and that they know upon enter­ing the space that it was designed specif­i­cal­ly for them. Like this is my goal with the library. And so mak­ing it open source so that it is avail­able and it’s acces­si­ble is real­ly impor­tant to me. 

On the oth­er hand, I feel that while I want to avoid a pro­pri­etary rela­tion­ship to Blackness I’m not try­ing to own Blackness. I do feel a kind of pro­tec­tive­ness. And so we’re hav­ing to think about the con­struc­tion of this library in ways where…how do we make it non-neutral? How do we keep— How do we make this open with­out mak­ing it open for exploita­tion? And so there’s a few dif­fer­ent ways that we’re try­ing to do that. 

So one is through again, the nav­i­ga­tion. I’m show­ing you this mock­up here because I want you to see that this is not a site where you just see 3D mod­els in the sort of grid­ded list. You’ll see 3D mod­els sort of inter­spersed on the page along with arti­cles around the his­toric politi­ciza­tion of Black hair. I want this to be real­ly a site of cul­tur­al pro­duc­tion and repro­duc­tion, where you can just as eas­i­ly stum­ble on a playlist full of emerg­ing Black artists and oth­er kinds of Black cul­tur­al media. And so it’s not just ​“here’s a mod­el.” It’s real­ly less of a util­i­ty and more of an invi­ta­tion to invest in the Black community. 

Let’s see, how am I doing on time.

So, one of the things that I’m think­ing about when I devel­op this kind of work— And I do want to leave time for ques­tions so I’ll stop in a cou­ple of min­utes so we have ten min­utes but— It’s real­ly impor­tant to me to get out of the sort of nor­ma­tive, false neu­tral­i­ty that I see in so many tech spaces. Like everything…especially in these large mar­ket­places, every­thing seems to be san­i­tized. There’s no voice. It’s meant to be neu­tral, apo­lit­i­cal. And that’s not some­thing that I’m inter­est­ed in. I’m inter­est­ed in cre­at­ing a tech­nol­o­gy and tools and spaces that make a state­ment, that have a polem­i­cal voice. And so every aspect of this res­i­den­cy as this social prac­tice work, is how I think of it, I have to sort of push back against doing things that’re default or real­ly just fol­low­ing estab­lished practices. 

And so one exam­ple of that is recent­ly we did the open call, and I am very invest­ed in mak­ing sub­mis­sions quick and easy for artists and respect­ing their time. So here’s the open call that went out. This was post­ed on afro​hair​li​brary​.org. And as you can see you’ve got some typ­i­cal things: name, address, pro­nouns, port­fo­lio. All of the things that you would expect. You know, what skills a per­son has. 

But then, mak­ing the state­ment very clear up front that the Open Source Afro Hair Library exists for the explic­it pur­pose of depict­ing Blackness in anti-racist, inter­sec­tion­al fem­i­nist, anti-capitalist ways. And ask­ing why peo­ple are inter­est­ed in con­tribut­ing to the project. Asking if poten­tial col­lab­o­ra­tors have afro-textured, coily, or kinky hair. Do you have the kind of hair that we’re look­ing to depict? And if so or if not do you under­stand, do you have an inti­mate under­stand­ing of the shape, move­ment, and body of this kind of hair. 

And my favorite ques­tion, which has func­tioned as a real­ly excel­lent screener—and again, reaf­firm­ing that idea that we are non-neutral, that we have a voice—is my favorite ques­tion: Would you under any cir­cum­stances put raisins in the pota­to salad? 

Now, I will say this is some­what lim­it­ed to a Black American expe­ri­ence. But as I found out through the six­ty or so appli­ca­tions we’ve received, there is a dias­po­ra con­nec­tion, just an intu­itive under­stand­ing that no, hell no, raisins do not belong in pota­to sal­ad. So it was real­ly a fun oppor­tu­ni­ty to see how peo­ple would respond to that ques­tion. And it real­ly was an effec­tive screening.

Oh, I love to end with this quote from Ruha Benjamin. Her book Race After Technology has been such an impor­tant work that’s inform­ing my prac­tices here. One of the things that she says is that Black peo­ple already live in the future. And I think that that state­ment is real­ly dri­ving all of the work that I do and all of the ways that I’m think­ing about the Library. 

Yeah. Usually I talk way too much and I answer every ques­tions so I’m gonna hold back to allow peo­ple to actu­al­ly ask those ques­tions. Yeah, that’s my pre­sen­ta­tion. Thank you so much. 

Golan Levin: Thank you so much A.M. So we do have some time for ques­tions, which is fan­tas­tic. And I see a few ques­tions in the YouTube chat so I’m gonna pull from there. One per­son asks, I think it’s a fair­ly sim­ple ques­tion, ​“Curious if in the ear­ly search­ing for exam­ples in 3D mar­ket­places more from-the-community terms like say, ​‘nat­ur­al hair’ turned up less sketchy results than more open or famil­iar terms.” 

A.M. Darke: Oh. You know what? I don’t remem­ber. I’m lit­er­al­ly going to search this right now because I’m so curi­ous. Let’s see what hap­pens if I type in ​“nat­ur­al hair.”

Ooh, okay. I’m gonna share screen again so that y’all can see. 

So ​“nat­ur­al hair”…is like, worse. This is actu­al­ly clos­er to what ​“Black hair” ini­tial­ly returned. This is real­ly fun­ny. So yeah. When I ini­tial­ly searched for Black hair when I was writ­ing grants, like, there would just be pages and pages like cows and ani­mals. Yeah. 

So, to answer that ques­tion about from-the-community terms…no. It does­n’t work. And so I actu­al­ly— The ini­tial title of the Open Source Afro Hair Library was the Open Source Natural Hair Library. But I changed it. Because you know, maybe ten years ago nat­ur­al hair was an intra­com­mu­ni­ty term. But then it became you know, as it does, kin­da appro­pri­at­ed and it’s like any­body with curly hair regard­less of their his­tor­i­cal strug­gle with said hair is ​“nat­ur­al.”

And there also became a kind of fetishiz­ing of nat­ur­al hair. Like if you look at Instagram nat­ur­al was still kind of hair like mine that was looser-textured or real­ly sealed, and coily and shiny and nat­ur­al hair wasn’t—like Type 4 hair—kinky, coily hair was not being cel­e­brat­ed as nat­ur­al as part of that beau­ty stan­dard. And so I actu­al­ly made an inten­tion­al choice to change from nat­ur­al to use the term ​“Afro” in part because I felt like the his­tor­i­cal pow­er of Afro, right, like not just rep­re­sent­ing a dias­po­ra but also the afro as a polit­i­cal sym­bol, would offer a kind of historicis—histor…I can nev­er say that word—and longevi­ty. Yeah. Thank you.

Levin: Another ques­tion that maybe this leads into. Someone asks, ​“I’m inter­est­ed in the con­ver­sa­tions around bal­anc­ing cre­at­ing dai­ly hair­styles ver­sus cou­ture or more imag­i­na­tive hairstyles.”

Darke: Yeah. So, again this is the first iter­a­tion of the fel­low­ship. And we have sev­en full fel­lows. This is also a sort of counter-practice that I did. There were many fel­lows who I felt did­n’t quite fit what I need­ed for the fel­low­ship, which was to seed the library with these 3D mod­els. They may not have been 3D artists or maybe weren’t total­ly aligned. But we did this low-residency fel­low­ship where I gave 10% of the stipend and there were no deliv­er­ables required. So it was real­ly like a ges­ture and invest­ment of bring­ing more peo­ple into the com­mu­ni­ty out­side of just being able to pro­duce these kinds of mod­els. And so that has real­ly enriched the con­ver­sa­tion, where we do have some folks who are doing this real­ly high sculp­tur­al work. 

But then you know, two artists— Actually Timid Clover, if I can bring those up just so that you have the ref­er­ence on screen. 

So, this series in par­tic­u­lar, Timid Clover’s inspi­ra­tion was sort of they want to do all lock­’d hair­styles, but going from every­day to regal and this sort of move­ment back and forth. And so I real­ly have appre­ci­at­ed Nikki’s input here in say­ing we’re not just going to do high cou­ture, it’s going to be sort of relat­able but also flex­i­ble and dynam­ic. And that’ll come out in their— This is also why we have artist’s state­ments because I think that insight into what the cre­ator’s think­ing about and what inspires them is real­ly pow­er­ful, and that’s how we… You know, again we don’t dic­tate the terms of Blackness, but we invite and we get to open up those con­ver­sa­tions. And of course there will be ongo­ing fel­low­ships and I’m always think­ing about the sort of total spread, mak­ing sure that we are cov­er­ing many dif­fer­ent bases. 

Levin: A.M., we need to close there. I want to thank you so much for shar­ing your Open Source Afro Hair Library with us all here, both in our res­i­den­cy and now with every­one online. There are some more ques­tions we did­n’t have time to address. If you look in the YouTube chat, some ques­tions about ​“extract­ing Blackness” and how that relates to licens­ing which I think are real­ly super inter­est­ing. We’re gonna shut down. You and I will turn off our cam­eras. And we’re gonna come back in just about a minute and a half a href=“http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/spring-2021-ossta-lecture-bomani-oseni-mcclendon”>with Bomani McClendon.

Darke: Thank you!