RESEARCH
DESIGN
COMPUTING
EDUCATION
DATAFIED PASTS, DESIROUS FUTURES
In this piece, I posit that in order to resist traditional logics of deterministic algorithmic prediction and broader data control, we must create technologies that invite us to lean into the discomfort of alternative forms of knowing in collaboration with machines. We have often relied on prediction technologies to make decisions for us based on a desire to tame chance and maintain continuity. However, by engaging in alternative forms of knowing, we can open ourselves up to new forms of being in the future.
Inspired by the Pan-Africanist tradition of the Sankofa bird (reflecting on the past to inform the future) African divination practices, and the legacy of Toni Morrison’s concept of rememory, this browser-based piece invites viewers to reorient their relationship with the browser itself towards a place of imagined possibilities and reclamation of futurity by displaying an array of rememory/past oriented prompt to reflect on and then future oriented prompts to connect them to. For each step, you are invited to write the prompt and your embodied data on a piece of paper and then reflect on the seam between them, illustrating the black box of becoming that algorithms often obscure from us.