I’ve been increasingly interested in this idea of media arts and crafts, and thinking about…honestly what that means. And so I actually selfishly have a question for everybody. The question is, did you have a book when you were younger that was somehow like a DIY, or arts and crafts, or some sort of instructional making guide for kids that had a lasting impact on you?
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In science fiction they have spaceships and long journey type of stuff, and most of the time people seem to be by themselves. So imagine having a little robot that you can just have on the ship with you and just talk to that, and it’d help you keep sane as you go through years and years of space travel.
All of my sculptures are unified by that they’re almost…you know 99.9% just paper, with different methods of printing, and are all handmade. And I think a lot about scale, and how the smallest thing can take up space.
Really what my work is concerned about is the body and technology. They’re often thought of as very different things. Technology is thought of in these sort of rigid forms and devices, and the body is like this organic other type deal. So, I’m really about exploring the tension between those things.
One of the most beautiful things for me about open source is that you don’t need permission. This is such an underestimated aspect of open source, which is that because there is no price, because there is no license, because there is no “contact us” button to get a trial… You just get the code, you don’t ask permission from anybody. You just get going. And I find that extremely powerful.
It turns out whenever humans make a metric that tries to prove their superiority—oh, we have language, or we do agriculture, we do tool-making—we usually end up just finding other living creatures actually really already do this also. Honeybees waggle dancing. Leafcutter ants doing agriculture. Chimps using sticks as tools.
This library is a movement that celebrates our history, our culture, and that serves our community to learn and grow as society evolves. And it holds us accountable in the ways we deal with Black people—our movements, our bodies, and our lives.
I make dolls but then another discipline that I’m interested in is programming and coding. And since I work in multiples a lot, something I think about is the difference in creating something physically versus digitally.
At the core of who I am as far as my practice I’ve always identified as an artist and have found that design and creative technology are really great vehicles for me to use to continue expanding the possibilities of art.
I created this concept called beauty technology. This was actually my PhD project. I was using cosmetics or beauty products and embedding circuits into them. So our skin, this two meters square of skin that we have, it could be an interactive platform.