Breaking, Dancing, Making in the Machine: Notes on ‘.break .dance’
Resumen (aún no traducido)
Breaking, Dancing, Making in the Machine: Notes on “.break .dance” adds conceptual context to the work undertaken in the .break .dance digital project and its explorations of time, code, Black diasporic thought, and internet experience.
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Processing
"The Caribbean machine, on the other hand, is flow and interruption at once; it is an absolute machine, a meta-machine, which cannot be diagrammed and whose user's manual may be found scattered among its own network of codes… In any event, the notion of polyrhythm (rhythms cut through by other rhythms which are cut by still other rhythms)—if it takes us to the point at which the central rhythm is displaced by other rhythms in such a way as to make it fix a center no longer, then to transcend into a state of flux—may fairly define the type of performance that characterizes the Caribbean cultural machine."
— Antonio Benítez-Rojo
In the following narrative, I want to share some of the process work behind .break .dance, a digital project I am piloting in response to the theme "Slavery in the Machine." .break .dance is what I refer to elsewhere as a research pocket. Each pocket is a thought exercise, as I look for forms that will help me better corral and interpret content. It is part of a constellation of projects by myself and other members of the Immersive Realities Lab for the Humanities. Across projects we have been interested in matters of time, space, and digital experience, for instance looking at a diverse range of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx texts situated across the Americas. Structurally, .break .dance extends a series of conceptualizations: notions of asymmetrical articulation as set forth by Zora Neale Hurston in "Characteristics of Negro Expression," Antonio Benítez-Rojo's description of the modern Caribbean as being historically constituted as a series of vast interlocking machines, Kwame Dawes's 2012 poem "Stop Time," Dalton Anthony Jones's Northern Hieroglyphics: Nomadic Blackness and Spatial Literacy, and Édouard Glissant's conceptualizations of Relation and plantation worlds, of une nouvelle région du monde.
"Coding" in .break .dance is understood as an instrument, practice, and heuristic for thinking about my own and others' acts of encoding and decoding, practices that were as important to surviving enslavement and Jim Crow as they are to navigating structures of increased state surveillance and the proliferation of digital technologies. The title .break .dance itself bespeaks the work of ontology in basic web development, wherein *.x *is used to mark classes of representation. A class structures style and behavior, so that a wide range of attributes can be applied to a web element by tagging it with the class. By understanding .break and .dance as classes, I am able to put into relation a range of disparate artifacts, and being so hands-on with my artifacts helps me suss why they call to me. In .break .dance, as in the following pages, your reading and the cursor's movement across the page trigger effects.
As a meditation on what it means to think about digital experience beyond (before?) standardized platform, .break .dance intentionally relies on the most basic web technologies—HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, while working in ways that resist the temporal dimensionality of digital reading and browsing. It also uses the reader's screen movements to defamiliarize some of those workings. Sometimes some things just don't act right: this is an intentionally homebrew project that I can easily show others how to make, but that is not made with reproducibility in mind. Further, as a project specifically interested in the temporal dimensionality of internet experience, .break .dance is encoded with cascading timers, a kind of temporal machinery that works with and against the site's form, a kind of slow movement that forces readers to feel time and, by extension, witness their own bodies in thought. Sometimes it is exhausting; sometimes, hopefully, invigorating. Indeed, .break .dance is a project committed to immersive experience as a kind of errant thought, to explorations that are not about being lost and to moments of authorship that are centered in a sense of writing as the orchestration of hearing and the recitation, re-citing, of voices. In the following short provocations, I name some of the theoretical orientations that became the structural argument for how and why .break .dance works in ways similar to what Benítez-Rojo describes as a kind of meta-machine, braiding, braiding across the times and spaces of inquiry.
Fugitive Algebras
Writing in the early 1980s, Antonio Benítez-Rojo identified a kind of thrumming live-wire recursivity at the heart of literary and cultural expression after the plantation, a sense that "Caribbean texts are 'fugitive' by nature." He continues, noting that, "If we look at the most representative Caribbean texts we see that the discourse of 'content' is erased by forms that are non-discursive, circular if you like, which finally come forth as the only vehicles able to lead the reader (and the text) to the plenitude of Being and non-Being, of the here and now together with the oblivious and absent. And so the final page of the text becomes the beginning." In Benítez-Rojo's sense of eternal returns that structurally resist repetition, as content comes into being through forms that resist identification and thus resist containment, I also hear a computational structure. Alan Liu, for instance, reminds us that
"Recursion is a function that delegates the processing of a problem to self-referential, iterative, and diminishing versions of the same function, bounded by an initial value and a terminating base case that are essentially the reminders of external determination acting on the system."
Indeed, in previous projects such as "Sample | Signal | Strobe," I conceptualize recursion as a modality that describes a variety of experiences with digital and collective memory, as experiences that do not belong to you come to be owned by you, even as they algorithmically transform you, "history's lessons." In "Echoing the Echoes: Technopoetics in Dub," Louis Chude-Sokei gives us an entry-point into connecting computational recursivity to cultural phenomena via his own concatenation of Édouard Glissant's conceptualization of the rhizomatic:
"It is not to be missed or forgotten that with Glissant there is no retour without detour. There are no roots without that return that constructs roots in the very process of reimagining its/their implications. That return transforms roots with traces of and techniques from its future and allows us to see roots not as a retreat into stability but, as David Scott suggests, as a generator of "new questions and new demands" and new horizons of expectation and possibility."
What Chude-Sokei frames as the possibilities inhering in acts of return that are in fact openings unto new things, non-return, can also be felt in DJ Spooky's and others' recognition of sampling and remixture as foundational to Black diasporic culture, a constant recombinatory mathematics of the living. Building on this in "Sample | Signal | Strobe," I note that:
"Al-Jabr, the breaking of the bones—movements, disjunctures, and migrations become sites of renewed emergence; moments become touchstones for larger cycles of losing and remaking meaning, of transformation without restoration, the impossibly fluid flow of the popping and locking body, the DJ using two turntables to disaggregate songs into discrete soundbytes so that they might be used *as if *they were digital, isolating out samples and breaks so that old texts could be made newly resonant with always present futures. Black lives hearken to the digital because Black diasporic existence is a digitizing experience. Transfer, migration, metonymy: the break and the remix persist as both witness and feature of the multiple and continual experiences of forced migration endemic to Afro-diasporic life in the Americas—the Middle Passage, the auction block, the Great Migration—'the digital.'"
Betsey Wing, in speaking of her work translating Glissant's novel, Mahogany, notes that
"A tree can be cut down and used for many things, but still it carries the record of time in its rings. "Timber aloft" carries sails; a tree can go anywhere. In times past, it brought the people from one world into life in another. From that point on it offered the dream of escape because trees, one and one and one, make a forest where one can hide. It also offers the model of rootedness and grounding that is Glissant's dream for the people of Martinique, simply put—that they will come to recognize and acknowledge where they are and make something of it."
Each branch of a tree repeats the tree. If you cut off a branch, it can be planted, which is to say that every part of the tree trees. Every tree trees as it records, rooting and branching.
Design based on Daniel Shiffman's "Recursive Tree." Each branch repeats the shape of the previous. Move your mouse to direct the growth.
Plenitude
With this sense of rhizomatic possibility in the broken and fragmented in mind, .break .dance has been developed with a rudimentary interface that shows its seams, and thus asks users to dance differently with a site by breaking some habits of browser and platform-based navigation. It invites users to play and adjust, to lay hands and find things in unexpected places, and to sink into reading and watching and thinking. Indeed, in my day job(s) I have had the opportunity to produce dozens of projects using technically stable and (rightfully) professionalized platforms. The form of .break .dance takes conceptual inspiration from contemporary thinking in speculative computing, and works to embrace the asymptotic yet resolutely indexical deliciousness of the broken and fragmented, the elicitation of continually emergent linguistic experiences.
Behind this also thrums Frances McDonald and Whitney Trettien's advocacy for the importance of following fragments in "A Threshold is an Opening":
"The pleasure of creating fragments comes from the dawning realization that, as Eve Sedgwick puts it, '[A] sentence may be actually inexhaustible.' Because we are taught to swallow books whole, we tend to think of individual clauses as mechanical parts that work together to advance a plot or an argument. As a digital scrap, detached 'from its material form, the sentence-turned- fragment becomes dexterous, sticky, promiscuous. It hurtles itself toward other fragments, combining and recombining to create new relations between and across texts."
Breaking, not just looking for the breach, á la deconstruction, but rather actively looking for ways to enter spaces in-between states juridical, psychic, emotional, or otherwise, and out of such space, glimpsing freedom. As is always the case, Zora Neale Hurston is incredibly helpful in thinking about how such freedoms are made. In "Characteristics of Negro Expression," Hurston describes some of the iterative, interactive, and intersubjective dimensions of Black dance performance, namely the use of "dynamic suggestion" to motivate spectators to bring their own bodies into the performance. By attending to the gap between oneself and one's audience, the dancer is able to elicit out of that gap an experiential imagination of all possible worlds:
"the Negro is restrained, but succeeds in gripping the beholder by forcing him to finish the action the performer suggests. Since no art ever can express all the variations conceivable, the Negro must be considered the greater artist, his dancing is realistic suggestion, and that is about all a great artist can do."
In her own mining of what Édouard Glissant would later refer to in *The Poetics of Relation *as the "clairvoyance of relational poetics," Hurston identifies how participation itself arises out of gaps between what the mind knows, anticipation, and what will be created anew at the moment of reception. From the club to the basement to any space where bodies and music meet, every rhythm carries and transmits an epistemology, and the audience's anticipation of the performer's next move or sound quivers at the edge of prophecy. When the performer's movement makes onlookers' bodies move, that movement already feels like something known and understood, even as that knowledge comes into being through the newness of the onlooker's own physical, emotional, or psychic response. This resonates with Julia Kristeva's critical conceptualizations of intersubjectivity in poetic language, is formally and fiercely theorized in M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong! is structurally exemplified in Gayl Jones's Corregidora, and has been brought to broader historical conceptualization by Zora Neale Hurston's descriptions of how the folk works a kind of cultural magic.
Errantries
.break .dance is about making meaning out of pieces of things—news, media, affects—fragments that come to us from elsewhere. I have been working with this as a larger conceptual framework for the last decade, most recognizably in my first monograph, *Haunting and Displacement in African American Literature and Culture. *In that project I developed paradigms for haunting, which is a term I give to experiences of knowledge that come to us from other people, times, and places, but that are experienced with the ontological force of personal memory. I have returned to that work recently because haunting is paradigmatically useful for thinking about the affective life of digital experience, and the inherently strange spatio-temporal positionalities that arise out of such experience. In "Sample | Signal | Strobe" I elaborate haunting as a strategy for doing a kind of Black digital humanities work, particularly vis-à-vis the conceptual implications of social media as a conduit for news about Black people's deaths.
I mention these projects because .break .dance has become the step between "Sample | Signal | Strobe" and the beginning of the Black Haunts in the Anthropocene project. As I discuss in .break .dance, while working on the Black Haunts project I found that I kept returning to the idea of being haunted by internet experience:
".break .dance began with a map or, more specifically, a chance encounter with a data visualization. And while my experience of that map soon became the kernel of a larger project about space, temporality, and ecological disaster—Black Haunts in the Anthropocene—that feeling of random and digital encounter stayed with me. What I initially experienced as a complex intermingling of comprehension, apprehension, and agency in internet navigation resonated with what in Haunting and Displacement I previously characterized as the haunted dimensionality of Black diasporic life. For even as the larger orientation of the Black Haunts project is about water and wind and earth, about varieties of backwater blues and parable tales, the experience that transited me to those considerations was about blackness, space, and time, about glitches—errors that reveal structures, and breaks—uncomfortable emergences of pasts and their affects and their rearticulations."
This notion of glitching, and of errors that reveal structure, returned me to some previous thinking about Édouard Glissant's deployment of the rhizomatic and his articulation of errantry in Poetics of Relation. Across projects I am interested in the Americas as a fundamentally digital lifeworld, which means resetting the historical timeline for the digital away from devices and instead centering populations' historical experiences, digitality. Glissant's terms are useful to this line of thinking because each brings us toward methods for managing the psychic and material effects of Black diasporic displacement, an interplay further elaborated in Katherine McKittrick's attentiveness to holding, simultaneously, the geographic and un-geographic realities of Black spatial experience in the wake of the Atlantic slave trade. The cascades of spatial and temporal feelings elicited by hypertext are also useful to this exploration, and .break .dance stages a variety of asynchronic and asymmetrical approaches to thinking about what it means to think with the screen, rather than merely imagining the screen is yet another way to reproduce paper. .break .dance is about what it means to represent intellectual process, and is thus also a meditation on what surfaces thought before thought becomes argument, and also what it means to honor the intensely layered and dimensionally scattered places from which the threads of insight emerge.
Further, if we accept that different scholars indeed come from different intellectual, cultural, and social places, then how do we take seriously the challenge of representing how people from different communities come to knowledge differently? When is difference understood as difference, rather than merely as wrong, as a glitch in a system? As Lori Emerson frames it in "Glitch Aesthetics," a glitch helps us to make a
"radical shift in what counts as an aesthetic object or aesthetic experience and asserts that its disruptiveness (in that a glitch constitutes a moment of dysfunctionality in the computer system) defamiliarizes the slick surface of the hardware/software of the computer and so ideally transforms us into critically minded observers of the underlying workings of the computer."
As illustrated in my lab mate Irisdelia Garcia's work in the digital vaivén: ghosts, the glitch, and puerto rican embodiment, when considered from a minoritized political position, glitches can be "understood as 'malfunctions' that are truly defining." Taken as a call to look for the moments and spaces wherein the systems that produce our social lives falter, a glitch becomes a powerful digital analog for experiences that might otherwise be understood as haunting and uncanniness. A glitch is what is generated when a signal goes wrong, so in a digital process when rows of code, while processing, unintentionally skip a line, or when a mechanical process misses a beat, generating a new "is." Glitch aesthetics attend to what is made in such moments, as moments of error, like an unintended breakpoint in a code, also offer forth artistic or interpretive opportunity, a moment of creation in the sense that something new is made, refreshed and referential, and interpretive because something about underlying technical structure is glimpsed in that moment of error, thus also opening a space for modalities of inquiry and contemplative experience Édouard Glissant describes as errant thought. In .break .dance, glitchiness is used as an aesthetic strategy that bears on the presentation of content and the limits of such presentation. It is where we ask questions, where we sink below the text, or where we wait to see what might re-emerge differently.
Even as the .break .dance project is about continually reproducing a rhizomatic site of inquiry, it also helps me consider the deep extent to which hypertextual experience is as much a matter of time as it is of space and place, and that these glitched movements can thus point us toward the vast interlocking machineries that worked to establish enslavement as a foundational social and economic system of the U.S. and Caribbean. "There was a time," Benítez-Rojo writes, "in which I believed that the code book to reading the Caribbean was the plantation."
Sankofa, Haile Gerima, dir. [excerpt, glitching during digital processing]
Irisdelia Garcia, from the digital vaivén
Mined the Gap
"I think I ought to clarify at this point that when I speak of a machine I am talking about the machine of machines, the machine machine machine machine; which is to say that every machine is a conjunction of machines coupled together, and each one of these interrupts the flow of the previous one; it will be said rightly that one can picture any machine alternatively in terms of flow and interruption."
— Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island
In the context of Antonio Benítez-Rojo's figuration of the Caribbean as an infinite series of interlocking machines, the tresillo's slanted symmetries might be said to evoke what Zora Neale Hurston, decades earlier, described as a kind of fundamental unbrokenness to be discerned in the apparent contradiction between rhythm and asymmetrical movement in Black art.
One might here imagine the gears of a clock, moving in different directions, reprinting the passage of time, but doing so through a series of oppositional movements. No one piece is responsible for the whole. Now explode this ticking clock so that each of its gears becomes observable to us in different times and spaces. The clock is still ticking, but without a grasp of its dimensionality, each piece is only perceivable in its own localized appearance, incompletely rendered. Carried by Sub-Saharan Africans to the Americas, the tresillo is a rhythm that articulates dimensional machineries. Edging more notes into every beat, the access to the tresillo helps performers find a little bit more space in the beat: a pocket that makes space for the three in the span of the two, the power of the hybrid temporalities instantiated in the aftermath of the Atlantic slave trade.
Hurston, maybe more than anyone before or since, understood how to plumb the theoretical possibilities embedded in the daily materialities of Black diasporic expressivities, and never hesitated in thinking about how Black lives cross time, space, and medium. Dead serious with tongue in cheek, Hurston's "Characteristics of Negro Expression," for instance, demonstrates what it means to hold and experience all the divergent parts of blackness within a single frame, and the kinds of spiritual, aesthetic, or conceptual magic such acts of holding make possible. In looking for productive and unbroken languages that can help me think about fragmentation, I have turned to Hurston's description of asymmetry in Black art:
"The presence of rhythm and lack of symmetry are paradoxical, but there they are. Both are present to a marked degree. There is always rhythm, but it is the rhythm of segments. Each unit has a rhythm of its own, but when the whole is assembled it is lacking in symmetry. But easily workable to a Negro who is accustomed to the break in going from one part to another, so that he adjusts himself to the new tempo."
In describing the Caribbean as a series of machines, Benítez-Rojo can be used to broaden Hurston's notion of asymmetry to account for how cultural forms can be encoded by social and economic systems, but also subsequently generate their own decryption keys:
"The Caribbean machine, on the other hand, is flow and interruption at once; it is an absolute machine, a meta-machine, which cannot be diagrammed and whose user's manual may be found scattered among its own network of codes… In any event, the notion of polyrhythm (rhythms cut through by other rhythms which are cut by still other rhythms)—if it takes us to the point at which the central rhythm is displaced by other rhythms in such a way as to make it fix a center no longer, then to transcend into a state of flux—may fairly define the type of performance that characterizes the Caribbean cultural machine."
But in remixing Deleuze and Guattari, Benítez-Rojo is able to identify how pockets of resistance are seeded and accessed by the enslaved and their descendants. Here, Benítez-Rojo's invocation of codes and coding works on several registers, which offers some insight into polyrhythm as inseparable from the social, political, and economic machineries that have historically attempted to reduce the people of the Caribbean into machines (which is to say that the presence of Africa descended people in the Caribbean is of course the absolute sign of the machineries' high and efficient functioning). We use the word code as a catch-all for the instructions we use in order to program machines to behave, language in its barest sense, rules and structures. Encoding is the act of making data readable in the terms set forth by that code structure. We use the term "codeswitch" to talk about what it means to move between different or competing structures, encoding our language and comportment to become readable by a given machine. We also use "code" to denote practices wherein the substitution or compression of terms can be used to hide information. In Benítez-Rojo's example, an individual's infinite capacity to codeswitch, to move across rhythms, also reduces the power of encoding itself. The transcendence of which Benítez-Rojo speaks, flux, thus emerges as a state of constant change. In computing terms, it is unclear whether this flux is the antithesis or apotheosis of code. Indeed insofar as .break and .dance are organizing classes of Black experience, breakdancing is actually something else, machinic movement that is also something more, the body that astonishes by moving into a heretofore unimaginable state. The flux and the glitch.
In "Sample | Signal | Strobe," for instance, I look at how coding and compression make it possible for people under surveillance to communicate in the open, knowing that the people around them do not know how to read the right signs, cannot sense the code nor its deployment. The polyrhythmic is also ruled by code, and also instantiates the presence of encoding: if you know to know, a tresillo tells your body to do something differently, that you have found your people, that you are in a kind of space, that you are in a pocket.
Both Hurston and Benítez-Rojo describe asymmetry/polyrhythm as a kind of formal complexity, not randomness but instead the body broken down, the parts of a clock, keyed to a rhythm that can only be decrypted through the onlooker's participation, through their willingness to find the beat and to be moved by it. Even when you cannot see it, you can feel it if given the opportunity to move into it. In the break, breaking it down, the spaces between the body's movements are extended, making available an expansiveness of human experience compressed into a series of discrete significations given whole expression through the audience's immersion and interactivity with the performance.
Polyrhythm is glitching named as a function of time, the layering of asynchronic parts to elicit a new wholeness. Asymmetry names the glitch as a function of flow—Hurston describes asymmetric movement as the embodiment of interruption in the service of larger, metaphysical, continuity. Brought together, we come to what Kwame Dawes describes as "stop time," which is the rhizomatic cultural precipitate of "African-based syncopations in music." Stop time, as Kwame Dawes describes it, is that which "tend to seduce us and enliven us with the illusion and reality of how rhythm can be manipulated." The act of manipulation, again, for instance, the three in the two, opens whole worlds of possibility. In .break .dance, I use a figure of a tendwa map to denote the kinds of passages across time and space made available by cultural engagements that let us tap into this power and possibility: the tresillo, the pop and lock, the ringshout. The tendwa is not a map to a lost home; this is not a story about nostalgic return. But "stop time" is mandate, invocation, and description.
Dawes continues:
"Stop Time, like the seeming off-kilter of reggae's rhythm, for instance, or the irresistible 'pockets' in dancehall rhythms and the clave patterns of the rumba, is often the basis of the swoop and sway of the dances that it creates. I have been fascinated by the way in which stop time is a beautiful and persistent piece of luggage Africans have carried with us even without knowing it is there, and in the poem the church becomes the place where it finds sacred power—a metaphysical moment of helplessness that relies on faith—the gap, the absence, the separation—before the bridge of faith that spans the gap and brings us safely home."
In mining gaps, the intersubjective space between intuition and groove, it becomes more clear how the things we carry with us can also be honed into powerful acts of decryption, into strategies for joy and resistance, the dance in the break.
OKO EBOMBO, "19 - IRO" [excerpt]
"Your ancestors' homes died in the water, as the familiar dirt and mountains and trees became memory. As much as they might have denied it, their homes were elsewhere, along with their lives and their lineages. Which we draw now, with pen and paper and no ink. Seeing, we use our hands to trace the topography of our own etchings to imagine. But even our imaginations cannot surrender the past and give us our freedom." — Amir Hall
Decryption
"Sometimes the photograph of a close friend or relative–looked at too long–shifts, and something more familiar than the dear face itself moves there. They can touch it if they like, but don't, because they know things will never be the same if they do."
.break .dance emerged out of two different attempts to decrypt a feeling. Perhaps due to their nascent and fragmented states, the two inquiries soon began to intertwine. The first came out of some writing for the 2016 CENHS conference at Rice, as I played around with the lyrics of Bob Marley's 1979 "Redemption Song." I was thinking about hybrid time in Black Haunts in the Anthropocene, and kept hearing Marley's "none of them can stop the time," which for me elicited a sense of power emanating from outside enslavement and its vicissitudes, and resonated with a kind of ecological millenarism common to Black popular music in the Americas. In the course of that research I came across Kwame Dawes's 2012 poem, "Stop Time," which brought me back to previous thinking about Fred Moten's In the Break.
This rhizomatic action is equally evident in Dawes and Marley, as both writers cast nets to either side, their work echoing pieces of other things—Marley for instance riffing on Marcus Garvey's "The Work That Has Been Done," and Dawes drawing from Hebrews 11:1, perhaps via James Baldwin, "the evidence of things not seen." In both cases, something nagged at me about each, but meaning was elusive. This is something more than simply recalling references; rather it is more like a kind of haunted citation that stops itself short of recitation. I, in turn, found myself haunted by these haunted texts. What does thinking about such movement make possible, and how does one think about it? In Haunting and Displacement, I explored phenomenologies of haunting across multiple valences. With projects like .break .dance, I am interested in methods of inquiry informed by a kind of critical hauntology.
I returned to critical hauntology in trying to understand what I experienced as a series of uncanny movements in Melina Matsoukas's video for Beyoncé's 2016 single, "Formation," a kind of strangeness that stayed with me. I first turned to constructing a visual inquiry, isolating the moments that stayed with me. There is of course much to say about "Formation," and about the Lemonade visual album as well, but my purpose in invoking Lemonadein .break .dance is as an illustration of a mode of thinking. This is not at all to suggest that Lemonade does not deserve critical attention, but instead to highlight a sense of the things that work on us as scholars, which is a bit different than only thinking about texts as texts that we work over.
This is what I saw in "Formation" that led me to this larger engagement with matters of machinery and code in Black diasporic life:
The "Formation" video includes a series of images of Beyoncé: black dress, bolero hat, silver jewelry. The bolero standing on the porch of what looks to be a plantation manor and her manner of dress, as I describe it in .break .dance, bespeaks power. She is dressed like someone who owns. Her dance generates a sense of the uncanny, of discomfort. This is a house, but it is not a home. Mining this vein, .break .dance continues:
"When the bolero figure first appears in "Formation," the men are still like statues as she jerks her head up and down in what can only be described as hyper-responsiveness of a marionette, the effect heightened because the figure's eyes are never exposed, magic or trance. The stillness of her body matches that of her retinue, but the head flies up and down, paced a sliver ahead of the song's beat, marking yet somehow also missing the song's time. Throughout the song this ever so slightly off beat movement continues with these scenes, and it is particularly notable because so much of the video's choreography is danced expressively on the song's notes, which is to say that the timing is clearly and intentionally impeccable. Much as the scenes of Beyoncé wearing denim and dancing on the street are made to ghost like old VHS recordings, the jerking head's movement ghosts the beat. Indeed, much as the video version of the song reboots itself every time it samples Messy Mya or Big Freedia's voice, Matsoukas introduces multiple instances of glitched representation, interrupting the smooth continuity of pop performance with an intimation of technological failure, tiny breaks out which emerge increasingly resonant possibilities."
The bolero figure's dance, like a pop and lock that never transmits its signal to its next component, to another bodily movement, is discomfiting in its incompletion. Quite different from what I elsewhere discuss as Zora Neale Hurston's description of asymmetrical beats and movements that generate a thirdspace of relation, an embodied machinery that produces spatial and temporal transcendence through contradistinction. The bolero figure's movement ghosts the tresillo inflected asymmetry of Black performance in the Americas, but stops short. This stop marks the place of the uncanny, which in this context resonates with Buse and Stott's articulation, following Freud, of uncanniness as a name for how "The familiar and secure is always haunted by the strange and unfamiliar, while the unfamiliar often has a troubling familiarity about it" and that "The experience of the Uncanny might be summed up as that moment when the seemingly natural reveals itself to be cultural after all."
If we are following the thematic of "slavery in the machine," then the bolero figure's glitched movement, its incomplete pop, this stop that is not a lock, reveals a gap. Live action is revealed as animation. Moving in an off time, something else emerges, the underside of "I just might be a Black Bill Gates in the making," the other side of the game, the other side of being she who owns.
Now armed with a theory of animation—animation is the term I needed and had not accessed. It gets me from conceptualizing the machined body instantiated under slavery (and as I explore in another pocket,Without Innovation: Black Lifeworlds and the Internet of Things), and points me towards theories of flow and interruption in Caribbean philosophy, which I can now bring back to other examples of Dawes's stop time that I have already assembled in similarly nascent ways, namely the filming of Baby Suggs's ringshout in Jonathan Demme's film version of Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Hiro Murai's video for Flying Lotus and Kendrick Lamar's "Never Catch Me." I put it in my pocket.
Beyoncé, "Formation," Melina Matsoukas, dir.
Born Digital
Dimensionality can be exhausting, which is to say that today we are also giving thanks (by the second drink) for membership in good support communities. We are grateful that we are now better equipped to understand how the too muchness that supposedly rationalized our exclusion was simply indexing other discomforts elicited by our presence. Anyone with experience diversifying an academic community becomes used to how the mere fact of your existence is taken as a referendum on everything that came before™ and thus by default you come to represent all the changes™, against which the sanctity of the intellectual enterprise will supposedly rise or fall. You, meanwhile, are just there because you want to do the work you love. You have chosen to do this work in often unwelcoming spaces not because you do not know any better, but because you so deeply believe it is work that must be done.
Antonio Benítez-Rojo, in asking us to think about the spatio-historical circumstances of contemporary diasporic life in the wake of the Atlantic slave trade, hearkens to this sense of survivance embedded in the kinds of knowledges constantly being re-introduced into the present:
"All machines have their master-codes, and the codebook to the cultural machine of the Peoples of the Sea is made up of a net-work of sub-codes holding together cosmogonies, mythic bestiaries, remote pharmocopoeias, oracles, profound ceremonies, and the mysteries and alchemies of humanity… The keys to this vast hermeneutical system give us an 'other' wisdom that runs next to and erodes the mortar of post-industrial society."
In thinking about coding and encoding, dimensionality, digitality, and other operational logics with which diasporic Black people have historically been able to draw lifelines out of various kinds of systemic oppressions, it is important to note the myriad ways Jones and Benítez-Rojo are also further describing how dancing against slavery in the machine also seeds space for the conjure, the work of other wisdoms that, as Charles Chesnutt and others have noted, mark how people have used culturally coded speculative, spiritual, and supernatural knowledges in the service of healing, and resistance. When transacting in evidences of things not seen, survival is the trace and thriving is the prize.
Indeed, even as Lemonade mainly appears in .break .dance as seed and trace of an inquiry's moment—it provides a visual and sonic leitmotif—it is worth taking a moment to look twice at the complex magic it surfaces. This magic is perhaps nowhere more evident than upon the appearance of a Mardi Gras Indian Queen in Lemonade's final quarter movement. Her appearance crosses multiple boundaries simultaneously, as the flash of her white bodysuit is the flash of an orisha; her headdress flashes as a Native American headdress, and the flick of her tambourine smudges the space, also perhaps referencing drumming in Santeria, tambour, or perhaps the rattle invokes the atchere, announcing the polyrhythmic soundscape of a toque, a song for an orisha.
In her sprawling and masterful 1991 novel Almanac of the Dead, Leslie Marmon Silko uses the experiences of Clinton, an itinerant African-American Vietnam War veteran, to highlight a sense of shared spiritual dimensionality across Black and Indigenous communities in the Americas. In Almanac he turns to oral histories, and also his college courses in Black Studies, to conceptualize and popularize a paradigm for Black survivance (drawing again on Vizenor's term), rather than merely relying on the habits of survival that have come to mark his own life. In Clinton's cosmology, in which he explicitly describes the Americas as a space in which "great American and great African tribal cultures had come together to create a powerful consciousness within all people"—one can understand Legba, Gede de Rouge, Ogun, the Maize Mother, Damballa, loas, Quetzacoatl, as nodes in a web, access granted through various media of ritual and practice:
"Clinton wanted black people to know all their history; he wanted them to know all that had gone on before in Africa; how great and powerful gods had traveled from Africa with the people. He wanted black Americans to know how deeply African blood had watered the soil of the Americas for five hundred years. But there had been an older and deeper connection between Africa and the Americas, in the realm of the spirits. Yet for a while, it must have seemed to the Africans who had survived ocean crossings that their gods had indeed forsaken them."
One foundation for Clinton's sense of connectedness is his own memory of his family's own tales of intermarriage with Cherokee tribal members, and also his memories of Mardi Gras Indian Queens. In Almanac, the Indian Queens are syncretized signifiers for material yet ephemeral (spatially and temporally sited) resistance—marronage.
I am having after-work drinks and snacks with my friend and colleague Lisa Brooks. The evening is warm and we are talking about our complex paths to our various kinds of digital and decolonial work. We know that we are having this conversation from a privileged position, tenured at a financially-resourced institution. Still we expand and contract with feeling, as constellations of our own and others' academic pasts brighten and fade over our conversation: all the times our work was too literary for studies departments, but too "cultural studies" for literature. All the ways, even today, we risk being excluded from the center of literature departments' self-imaginings, because we are too interdisciplinary or too ethnic studies or too experimental or, now, "too digital."
I am having after-work drinks with my friend and colleague Lisa, and we are talking about our various paths to digital work. Here I am sitting, losing and gaining, a stolen person on stolen land, losing and gaining with every passing second. Digital tools are more than tools, they are also approaches that make thought possible. How might I use the digital to think about the digital from a perspective wherein I am the subject degree zero? So not just asking where I begin and end, but also naming what I bring, and how I have arrived?
read more about magic and Black Indians in Lemonade
Whenever I am building a digital project I hear Audre Lorde—"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house," and I think: and still I want to build houses. It is significant that, when she puts forth her rightfully famous formulation, Lorde is specifically speaking about the painful and potentially self-effacing calculations required to align non-white women's interests with mainstream and academic feminism, a conversation that is still very much alive today. Still.
Whenever I am building a digital project I hear Édouard Glissant's gentle ambivalence about computing, as it stands in relation to other kinds of expressive investigation. The computer, he writes, "seems to be the privileged instrument of someone wanting to 'follow' any Whole whose variants multiply vertiginously. It is useful for suggesting what is stable within the unstable. Therefore, though it does not create poetry, it can 'show the way' to a poetics." But still.
But this argument has already been made, repeatedly. I only reproduce it here because, in my conversation with Lisa, I was struck how the starting point for the conversation had been the hard reality of doing digital or other kinds of nonstandard academic work in the nineties. Then, as now, we were interested in what digital affordances could bring to Black diasporic texts or indigenous expressive traditions because in them we saw opportunities to say things that we couldn't always say in ink and essay. Not because the texts were necessarily resistant or because we were unsure, but because we wanted so desperately to have critical forms that could sometimes show and not tell, forms that could express relationality differently, that could foreground media materiality, and because we both come from traditions wherein direct telling and explication are less valued than other modes of knowledge transfer.
As a format that focuses on enabling and archiving proto-inquiry, the thinking that gets me to the thought, .break .dance is a homebrewed non-platform that helps me think differently about showing rather than telling, to show how it feels to "multiply vertiginously," to explore the poetics of breaking and dancing, to mine for the poetics of response and resistance instantiated by the Atlantic slave trade, and to be inspired by what in The Repeating Island Benítez-Rojo describes as "the Caribbean machine, whose flux, whose noise, whose presence, covers the map of world history's contingencies, through the great changes in economic discourse to the vast collisions of races and cultures." Behind Benítez-Rojo's earliest descriptions of the Caribbean as a vast machinery constructed of interlocking machines constructed in imperialism and consolidated by the Atlantic slave trade, I still heard Lorde, who offers a nascent blueprint for how to control this machinery, how to transform the New World's difference engine into an analytic one:
"Within the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being. Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged."
In this we can also hear Glissant's sense of the stable within the unstable, surfing the chaos-monde, as Lorde describes multiplicity as the chaos of knowledge, out which more equitable futures are made. With this in mind, .break .dance is about reflection and refraction, about things that look broken and random but are coherent and self repairing when viewed through the right lens. The intensely vertiginous multiplication of crystals growing across a surface. We might experience the infinite variety as random, but it is not. Fractal, Benítez-Rojo's machineries carry a coastline's recursive yet infinite possibilities. The work of such machinations might feel random to our perception because it expresses at a scale beyond our comprehension, but it carries power in its pattern.
Networks such as those described by Emily Legg draw power and sustenance from traditions of shape changers and fluid structures that are not merely metaphors for margins or even sites of experimentation, per se. In thinking about this it is also useful here to turn again to The Repeating Island, and Antonio Benítez-Rojo's rendition of the geological facticity of the Caribbean archipelago—the ancient land bridge in pieces, pieces that become islands, each island seeding its own flourishing. In committing to such a turn, we are able to further explore the possibilities reminded to us in Katherine McKittrick's rendition of the world as continually available to renewed interpretation, the kinds of possibility encapsulated in the dialectic between language and the physical world, the heft of the geographic and the psychic trails forged in historical experiences of the ungeographic.
And maybe it is true that scholars of our generation will always be too x. We are well predecessed in our scholarly lineages, but also institutionally unprecedented. She and I are, respectively, .1 and 1.6% of our profession. Which is to say that even as we have become able to fight power with power, even just being here—where we are, as we are—will always remain a story about the deep traumas of the Americas set against our own experiences of survivance and diasporic dexterity. We are sitting on the patio of the Lord Jeffrey Inn, a restaurant owned by the college for which we work, and named for a British general whose blueprints for indigenous genocide sealed his fame as a great man of colonial American history. From Newfoundland to Colorado, North America is littered with the name "Amherst," vague fealty, the bankruptcy of conquest's spatial imagination, rubble out of which we nonetheless continually build futures.
But today we are also happy together, sipping the week's tiredness from our bones. As Gerald Vizenor reminds us, Survivance is more than mere survival. In this case we know that we are having this conversation from a genuinely privileged position, tenured at a resourced institution, structurally better enabled now to ease others' paths. But there is always an edge, and it is sharp. For we know that we are having this conversation from a genuinely tesseracted position. I am a stolen person sitting with my friend on land that was stolen from her. What land are you sitting on right now? Who are you?Where are you? (via Native Land Digital)
One might also think here of Katherine McKittrick's rationale for navigating between materialist and figurative understandings of Black diasporic spatial experiences. In articulating what is at stake in conceptually navigating between the often simultaneously geographic and ungeographic realities of diasporic experiences, McKittrick highlights how "overlaps between materiality and language are long-standing in the diaspora." Further, because language and other media are so often called upon to do the work of establishing or transcending space, working to
"forge a conceptual connection between material or concrete spaces, language, and subjectivity, openings are made possible for envisioning an interpretive alterable world, rather than a transparent and knowable world."
From this perspective, we have always already been thinking about the digital. Much as Ntozake Shange would create the term "choreopoem" to describe her 1975 for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, artists constantly create new representational forms that better express the social, cultural, and historical paradigms out which their work arises. Across .break .dance I take, as objects of contemplation, excerpts from Beyoncé's visual album Lemonade. Even as it tells a story, moving across the stages of a woman's reckoning with infidelity, in its orchestration of multiple voices, layered sites of authorship, and parlaying poetry and dance to make implicit and explicit claims grounded in the most private sites of racial and sexual injustice, Lemonade shares many similarities with the formal innovation of Shange's choreopoem. As collages, both texts show their seams, and in so doing produce intersubjective spaces of encounter between reader, idea, and text. Trettien and McDonald identify the power of forms that rely on gaps and fragmentation to invite readers to generate meaning in the spaces between and around things. "Some strange alchemy occurs in the moment a sentence becomes a fragment—" they write, "it simultaneously gains both heft and dexterity. No matter which sentence you select, it will speak to you in some oblique way, to your current project or your current romance."
Dalton Anthony Jones, in asking us to think about the spatio-historical circumstances of contemporary diasporic life in the wake of the Atlantic slave trade, hearkens to this sense of survivance embedded in the kinds of expressive pathways constantly being re-introduced into the present:
One might also think here of Emily Legg's thinking, which points us toward understanding the deep systems transformations necessary to decolonizing digital spaces. In "Networked Knowledge," which builds on the work of scholars of indigenous memory and history such as Kimberly Roppolo and Chris Teuton, Legg reminds us to think in explicitly digital materialist ways about the kairotic possibilities of
"storytelling as knowledge-making and a way of knowing is not placed within one individual who passes the knowledge down to others. Instead, it is knowledge that exists in a networked state with the role of the community as knowledge producers."
In creating and cultivating the .break .dance digital project, I am thinking about how digital inquiries potentiate forms that literally and figuratively enhance, even sometimes transform, the kinds of social, creative, and political networks out of which we have ourselves emerged.
I am also thinking about how, as Wendy Chun and others have shown, a computer's backend stability, the computational processes that enable a platform's ordering of spatial and temporal experience as a recognizably useful or generically pleasurable digital experience, also come at a cost. In "Sample | Signal | Strobe," I take up the question of how, in the ticking away of the timeline and in the displacement of user input, digital social media acts are simultaneously obscured and data-archivable, ethereal and earthly undersea cables, black boxes, algorithmic displacement. Thrumming below this characterization is Tara McPherson's assessment of how North American regimes of race and gender have historically moved in tandem with key understandings of the purpose and execution of computer coding. "Both exist as operating systems of a sort, and we might understand them to be mutually reinforcing." She continues:
"Certain modes of racial visibility and knowing coincide or dovetail with specific ways of organizing data: if digital computing underwrites today's information economy and is the central technology of post-World War II America, these technologized ways of seeing/knowing took shape in a world also struggling with shifting knowledges about and representations of race."
"Letter-by-letter, syllable-by-syllable, word- by-word, image-by-image, a new language, embryonic and inchoate, is defacing the value accumulated in the creaky edifice that is crumbling around us even as it continues to churn out and police its signifiers. The art of spatial literacy—the ability to read one's environs in order to decode and disrupt the center of discourse—is the lingua franca of blackness. The disintegration of language, the transcendence of its limitations and the acknowledgement of its betrayals, has led to a fluency with the "multiplication of modes of writing" that fill this littered, lettered landscape."
1/5
The signatures of the spirits are outlined in ashes and cornmeal on the ground.
For Legba-Gede, they paint the cardinal points, the crossroads of the universe.
— Leslie Marmon Silko, The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel
A section titled "Resurrection" comprises one of the longest interludes during the Lemonade visual album, appearing between the set-piece performances of the songs "Sandcastles" and "Freedom."
Early in the section, the audience is asked to follow a grass path in first person perspective. We come upon Beyoncé, dressed in a wax cloth dress, sifting through an antique trunk tied with memory ribbons. Here she is more guide than protagonist, as her movements in and out of spaces hyperlink those spaces over time, for instance from the picture-strewn path into the candle-lit rooms that visually resonate as part of a colonial fort in the Caribbean, or perhaps a slave castle like Cape Coast, Gorée, or Elmina. At the beginning of this movement, we first encounter her as a reflection in a mirror. The space, though dark, is also cut by swaths of daylight.
This resonance is amplified as the scene segues immediately into images of cast members holding pictures of loved ones killed by racial violence. Though there is no commentary offered, the cast members' appearances are interspersed with those of Black women whose children, namely Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner, had been recently killed in acts of police violence. Each child's photo is held by a mother, respectively Sybrina Fulton, Lesley McSpadden, and Gwen Carr, women who would later remain recognizable throughout #BlackLivesMatter as "Mothers of the Movement." Their inclusion in the space of the text radically shifts Lemonade's emphasis from matters of infidelity, power, trust, and recuperation to larger questions of identity, civic membership, and mourning, now further refracted as facets of Black women's lives. Filmed just a few months after the women's losses, having them appear together in the same span of film, and with each woman staged similarly in her grief, strengthens the sense of each woman's loss as part of a larger phenomenon. Each loss is scattered temporally and geographically, yet each is also historically and socially linked, an example of Black diasporic digitality (which I discuss at length in "Sample | Signal | Strobe").
This sense of moving across time and space is also heightened by the alternating uses of color and black and white photography, and also because the different women in the interlude are filmed using different aspect ratios, which generate a sense of device difference that emphasizes spatial and temporal difference, even as the overlaying of James Blake's song "Forward" and the timing of the camera's zoom into each woman's photo over the entire segment heightens continuity. Indeed, this comes to a head in McSpadden's moment, as her tears and the subtle shaking of her head, a soft "no," remind us of her fresh pain and also name the gift of her allowing an eminently private loss to continually resonate as a public one, a kind of civic intimacy.
2/5
"Sandcastles," the song immediately preceding this section of Lemonade, is a song about lost dreams and marital realities. It is a quiet and soft song, and its visual performance in Lemonade is intensely intimate, mainly alternating between medium shots of the protagonist performing in private, which heightens a sense of her solitude and contemplation, and intense close-up shots of her with the partner with whom she seeks reconciliation. Paired with the piano driven melody of the song, the close-ups risk seeming invasive, visual cognates to the protagonist's cracking voice. (You can unmute above.)
This alternation in shot distance moves with a rhythm similar to the camera's zooming and distancing later during "Resurrection." Taken together, the "Sandcastles" performance and the "Resurrection" segment enable Lemonade to evince a straight line from the personal to the political. In allowing audiences to share in quiet aftermaths of women's loss, the sequence pushes us into a new sense of time and space, a sense of having been offered a glimpse into a pocket of Black female experience that carries implications for the very possibility of sustaining thriving lifeworlds in the Americas. Aftermath is the terrain, what grows after the reaping.
3/5
In Lemonade it is a Mardi Gras Indian, Queen Ya Ya of the Washitaw Nation, who is given the task of clearing the space that enables a transition from "Resurrection" to the next segment, "Hope." The rattle of her tambourine opens the space, smudging boundaries between what has come before and that which might hope to arrive after.
The queen approaches the camera to exit the room, crossing the viewer's perspectival plane as the scene morphs into a second room. The editing here is not seamless, and the transition between rooms visually shifts just a bit. A twinge of the uncanny, a technical glitch, as her entrance into the second room is an almost repetition of her first arrival. The protagonist and dancers from a performance earlier in Lemonade that also uses glitched performance, "Sorry," reappear in silence as a voiceover whispers "magic."
Much as the audio-only version of the following song, "Freedom," ends with an elder speaking of turning personal loss into a larger sense of survival that her audience can understand, even before she speaks it—listen to the call and response as the audience calls out with her, "but I made lemonade"—the inclusion of this image from "Sorry" further amplifies the meaningfulness of transforming individual loss into a shared sense of survival.
4/5
The landscape and built structures across the "Resurrection" segment are from the visual montage at Lemonade's opening, and similarly highlight Black femme portraiture as emerging from, or perhaps in spite of the pains and secrets sedimented in the U.S. Southern landscape. Both the "Resurrection" and "Hope" segments are also paired with recitations of Warsan Shire's poetry, thematically redolent in its work to link Black women's experiences of romantic loss to larger conceptual frameworks premised on the ubiquity of social and civic loss—slavery and the precipitates of violence over time.
The segment's denouement introduces an infant alone on a bed, as a muted instrumental from "Freedom" plays. The instrumental fades again as the scene soon transitions. Every child might evince a sense of hope, but acts of looking at Black children in the Americas might, like a brief shiver, also re-animate a sense of fear and foreboding, which is here amplified by the segment's inclusion of the Mothers of the Movement. Because the song's arrival is soon interrupted, it is experienced as intimation of something else. In this way freedom is literally something glimpsed from the future, which further heightens the intense outpouring of emotion that can be released when the song reappears a few minutes later in Lemonade. If in the larger .break .dance project I am interested in working with Hurston's notion of asymmetrical performance and Dawes's sense of "stop time," it is also worth noting here a different kind of temporal effect that must be survived, and that precipitates the cultural responses identified by Dawes and Hurston—split time. I identify such an experience as one of the breadcrumbs followed in .break .dance, as the broken break dance of the porch figure in black during "Formation," begins to mimic the movements of the dancers in denim, who are staged as clearly operating in a different time and place.
At the end of "Resurrection," for instance, we follow the Beyoncé protagonist as she steps through a door, presumably the door to the fortress where she first appeared in the segment; the frame rate slows, elongating each of her steps. This movement splices into a shot of the Black women whom we encounter throughout Lemonade, themselves stepping into an outbuilding kitchen, the camera's eye vertically matching their angle of approach to Beyoncé's. The women are quiet and working. Perhaps it is the appearance of the segment title, "Hope," or the visual abundance of foods with which they work. But their work feels focused and joyful, a sense of presence and competence that stands, and perhaps has always stood, in opposition to historical circumstance: the plantation kitchen is an absolute representation of Black women's subjugation. At the same time, it is also a place that, for fleeting moments, offers a sense of domain, a space of control despite the forces that mandate their presence and action in the space. Their food and its origins, cabbages from Europe, apples from Asia, corn, yuca, cassava, and squash from the Americas, and watermelon from Africa, reflect the broadening of knowledges that have also come to characterize that domain. Much as Beyoncé's character is more symbol than agent in this segment, these are not women; they are a feeling about identifying as women.
5/5
The landscape and built structures across the "Resurrection" segment are from the visual montage at Lemonade's opening, and similarly highlight Black femme portraiture as emerging from, or perhaps in spite of, the pains and secrets sedimented in the U.S. Southern landscape. Both the "Resurrection" and "Hope" segments are also paired with recitations of Warsan Shire's poetry, thematically redolent, linking Black women's experiences of romantic loss into a larger conceptual framework that simultaneously holds the ubiquity of social and civic loss, the precipitates of enslavement, and the evolution of gender-based violence over time. Say her name.
A sense of Black women's historical oscillation between trauma and recovery carries into the next segment, "Hope," which overlays a recitation of Warsan Shire's poem "Nail Technician as Palm Reader" as the viewer is returned to the same fortress setting that opened the previous segment.
The sky darkens, thunder and lightning, and we see the Beyoncé protagonist traversing the space and up a set of stairs. Her ascent makes me think of director Haile Gerima's Sankofa, the idea of exiting out of the slave castle through "the door of no hope." At the beginning of * Sankofa* (pictured here as a glitched graphic), Gerima's protagonist Mona exits the door into a past of American enslavement. At the end of the film, Mona reverses this passage and steps into a newly historicized sense of freedom, having survived history's lessons, à la Octavia Butler's Kindred. In Lemonade, the square of the slaver's castle door has become a slit, and the image becomes one of birth as redemption or ascension, rather than passage into exile.
Un|Return
In other words, dimensionality is a gift, for better or for worse. One might think here of Trettien and McDonald who, in writing about the value of working with and through fragments, note that
"Viewed from the vantage point of the partial, the old idea that books are written in solitude by great authors is dislodged and gives way to a new understanding of creative production as a reflexive process that takes place at the thresholds between readers, writers, texts, and technologies."
Some of this is a matter of interface. As Trettien and McDonald highlight, the form of the book itself invites an imagination of control and coherence. This sticks with me, and I am thinking about how navigation is of course central to interface, but that how we control navigation varies so differently, according to our positionalities and experiences in the world, as Dalton Anthony Jones explores in "Northern Hieroglyphics: Nomadic Blackness and Spatial Literacy."
Yes. In "Teaching the Map," which I use as the opening invocation for .break .dance, poet Christina Olivares reminds us of how the very structures through which we observe our worlds are often based in fundamentally limited perspectives on how to report what we see, know, and understand, even in just very literal and material ways. This offers an interesting entry point for digital humanities in the Americas. Indeed, Christy Hyman, in her ongoing work with digitally mapping the escape routes of enslaved people through the Great Dismal Swamp, The Oak of Jerusalem, highlights the "navigational literacy" enslaved people used to transform an untamable and uninhabitable place into one of refuge from the carefully managed, and thus even more drastically uninhabitable, carceral space of the plantation. In Oak, Hyman uses georeferencing to integrate historical maps with contemporary digital and satellite maps, which enables her to demonstrate transformations in landscape over time.
Using the same digital tools, Hyman is also able to re-map spatial information from other kinds of sources, for instance the narratives and storytelling of enslaved people, people who were able to use their status as cogs in slavery's machine to produce active knowledge bases about their physical environment, for instance by reading the stars, and other ways of transforming objects and environments into codices. The North Star is a reference point, and knowing to look enacts an eminently deep time way of knowing where you are, how to move from the scalar to the local. To draw from Olivares, and the title of the book from which "Teaching the Map" is excerpted, to say that No Map of the Earth Includes Stars is to mark the failure of commonly accepted representational forms, in this case the removal of human experience from a form that is meant to augment that experience. One must be able to see this if one is to pursue freedom. Rectifying our maps, remembering all our forms of knowledge.
A pocket is a place; it is also a position. Pockets are also places for experimentation in form and content. A pocket is also a kind of space, a thing behind a thing, the thing you hold on to, just in case. It is the non-space between thought and its elaboration or instrumentation, a tiny universe of intellectual possibility. In "Sample | Signal | Strobe," I am working through some of the stakes of resetting the timeline for what we characterize as the emergence of digital technologies, an approach that is grounded in an anarchaeological approach to thinking about digital social media. In exemplifying the possibilities inhering in the use of research pockets as sometimes ephemeral stakes in ongoing research processes, .break .dance is about the anarchival. Senselab offers a useful description of what such things might look like:
"The question is how what moves an event into taking form can be archived, as opposed to documenting the content of the event. Can traces of the event's liveness be captured, in a way that might set the stage for a next event to occur in its wake? The anarchive would then be a kind of process seed bank for the dissemination of forces of emergent taking form."
With that in mind, .break .dance is an example of using digital methods to explore and represent ways of being that resonate with the desire to engage practices of play, creativity, and relationality that are already constantly being respawned and rearticulated in ephemeral, temporarily decolonized, spaces made possible in digital projects. For better or for worse.
Ashé
Cite this work
Parham, Marisa. "Breaking, Dancing, Making in the Machine: Notes on '.break .dance.'" sx archipelagos, no. 3, July 2019. https://doi.org/10.7916/archipelagos-xn3y-vj19.
This companion is provided for search and citation. Return to the interactive essay for the authored digital experience.
Biografías de los autores
Marisa Parham
Marisa Parham is affiliated with Amherst College.