hand woven textiles, metal, wood, ultrasonic sensors, sound, neural network (2024)
00_ To Create Love With Dry Eyes is an interactive sound sculpture that explores Black diasporic practices of encoding, weaving, oral histories, and divination. This project speculates on the form of the database server, an ubiquitous feature of digital infrastructures that is often hidden from view.
Combining West African narrow loom weaving traditions, binary sand divination practices, proximity sensors, and sound design this server takes the form of a minaret and requires viewers to build a relationship to it to have access to its information. An oral database plays from the sculpture crafted from conducted interviews and field recordings taken on historic sites of Black maroon settlements. Interviews were held with prominent Black feminist scholars and artists on the topic of Black futures.
Using a machine learning model the sculpture senses for the proximity and duration of time that the viewer spends with the work. As the viewer spends more time, different components of the oral database become audible. This work invites the viewer into a relationship with the database form, not as an inert piece of hardware but as a material and contingent relationship that requires your presence and time. This work is the first of a larger series called The Future Conditional.