Ancestral

Brooklyn Rain
Critics Page on Art and Technology
Ed. Charlotte Kent
May 2023

 

To be reprinted in Slow Technology Reader
Ed. Carolyn Strauss
Amsterdam: Valiz, 2025
Forthcoming

 

This short essay was commissioned for the Brooklyn Rail’s Critics’ Page on Art and Technology, which invited contributors to present concepts omitted from dominant discourses and debates in the field.

From the essay:

“Inheriting the space-time of coloniality, popular discourses on art and tech crystallize around the inevitability of forward motion that proceeds through sharp ruptures with (implicitly non-Western) pasts. They project aesthetic futures synchronized to the tempos of technoscientific progress. They reduce extractivist effects, algorithmic harms, and ecological byproducts to the realm of parenthetical reference. At the core of these discourses is the claim that the hyper-novelty of the present demands new ways of knowing, thinking, and making that do away with the presumed obsolescence of what came before.”

 

R: Sarah Rosalena, Above Below, 2020. AI-generated textile, cotton, training: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite images taken from High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE).