Extinction Event

• Year: 2021... ongoing
• Team: Ayodamola Tanimowo Okunseinde, Mary Ann Badavi, Sohee Cho, Jeffrey Geiringer
• Role:

  Concept, Design, Technology

Christina Sharpe's In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016) asks, "[w]hat kinds of possibilities for rupture might be opened up[,]” she implores us to take seriously the possibility of Black extinction and anti-blackness as the ground on which we stand. Extinction Event is an answer to Sharpe's call, a work of protest against Black death caused by police brutality. It makes a critique of the ways in which the American progressive linear temporality and oppressive technological infrastructures collaboratively permit the proliferation of Black death. In this project, we accelerate both progressive temporality and technological positivism, and as such attempt to exhaust all possible iterations of police-related Black deaths, thus annihilating unjust Black death altogether.

The Extinction Event system generates images of violence against Black bodies by law enforcement based on preexisting cell phone, dashboard, and body camera footage utilizing a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). The images are presented to an Image Recognition System (IRS) and its output drives a Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2 (GPT-2) model trained on the corpus of Black philosophers, psychologists, and critical race theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Octavia Butler, and James Baldwin.

Extinction Event represents both the collapse of all Black death and the failure of the machine to process and render Black death. The cadre of images generated through this project digitally memorializes the Black people we’ve lost to police brutality across time and space and illustrates the sheer infinite monument of Black death that sustains the dream of white supremacy. Though this project actively conjures Black death with the aim of eliminating it (via negation), it also leads us toward a horizon beyond a world saturated with Black death. Can we imagine a year in which no Black person is slain by police? What then?

Black Box   ⬆️

• 2022

The machine, represented as a literal and proverbial Black Box, calls to service the same algorithms and technologies used to oppress and surveille Black bodies to interpret and reason with the extinction of Blackness. It fails. Unable to process and resolve the unimaginable violence, the frustrated system emits light, sound, and smoke output, ephemera that represent the illusive and inconceivable magnitude of Black death.

The Machine, In Religious Awe   ⬆️

• 2022

The Machine, in Religious Awe 1, 2, & 3 are results of the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) algorithm of the Extinction Event system. Trained with cell phone and bodycam data on violence Black Bodies, the machine-learning system digests found images of Black death by police brutality and spawns reproductions of those images to exhaust all possible future representational permutations of Black death. The process challenges the ruthless and seemingly endless onslaught of police brutality against Black bodies and the subsequent desire to consume the macabre images via TV, film, and social media. The title references a phrase in Orlando Patterson's 1999 essay Rituals of Blood: Sacrificial Murders in the Postbellum South where he describes the desire of White crowds to see and take trophies of Black death, in religious fervor. The GAN images are overlaid with gold leaf, silver leaf, and glitter to impart them with desirable glisten and trophy-like attributes. Simultaneously the ostentatious appliques obscure the image in an attempt to resist pornography of violence. The resulting image, ornately gilded, religiously ethereal, belies the undergirded violence and challenges the participants to confront their rationale for viewing the work.

Infraction   ⬆️

• 2022 [collaboration with Olamipe Okunseinde]

Infraction is a televised announcement to sensitize the public about the state-sponsored campaign against Black life. By subverting the tools of mass media which so often desensitize the public to Black death, we instead headline the extensive brazen transgressions and impunity of the state and its law enforcement against Black life. In the form of a CRT television set with an embedded Raspberry pi, the work reads, via the Infraction API, real time news and media mentions of Black bodies extrajudicialy murdered. Once a report is detected, the system displays an onscreen audio/video glitch as a warning to the viewer. Infraction is also a virtual agreement between the viewer and the machine that prepares viewers to receive the images in the machine, in religious awe responsibly and mindfully.

Witness   ⬆️

• 2022 [collaboration with Olamipe Okunseinde]

A sister-project to Infraction, Witness utilizes the reach of mobile phones in an effort to sensitize the wider public not only to Black death, but to the state-sponsored crimes that are responsible for Black death. Witness, in a nod to Mimi Onuoha's "When Proof Is Not Enough" (2020), questions the limits of cell phone video evidence. It also calls us as viewers to consider our individual complicity in the viral spread of media portraying Black death. The 20 Samsung Galaxy A20 phones utilize the Infraction API via web app to alert (in the form of audio/video glitch) the audience in realtime when there are social media mentions of Black bodies extrajudicialy murdered. By viewing the mobile phones together, we get to visually grasp the sheer aggregate scale of viral Black deaths. Witness also prepares viewers to responsibly view and interact with the components of the machine, in religious awe.