AUTHOR’S NOTE: before you begin the thesis chapters detailed here please read my foreword and acknowledgement section
Prelude | hannah holtzclaw
CONTACT:
i press my fingers against it. feel the cool indifference. not quite flexibility not quite resistance.i slide my hand across the surface, feeling for cracks and imperfections. alive beneath my palm this superficial disaffection. obscured from sensation, saved from insurrection. you can look but don't touch, don't feel, we haven't time for interconnectedness.if I lay my hand just right against the walls of experience, I can feel the vibrations of others, artificially estranged and deleterious. A funny thing, the ways we are taught to unfeel the human imprint. Carefully atomized reality, mediated existence. I over other, detachment's precondition.Standing at the threshold, pressing against the surface. Searching for contact, reciprocal purpose.interface:
This research emerged from an interest in the way “interface” of the 21st century have come to structure communication and experience and how we might design interface, as a communication tool, differently. The problem with this framing, as I quickly learned, is that the interface I was concerned with is less a distinct object and more an assemblage of historical socio-technical processes.
The definitions of interface are twofold and force the term’s application into either abstract concepts of engagement or loosely described computational processes. As a noun, interface can be described as point of interaction between two or more, subjects, systems or groups; in computing, interface is a device or program, an effect, that allows for human-computer interaction. In the abstract interface is interaction, connection, translation, communication; or what some scholars have called an effect, process, or set of cognitive relations or aesthetic regimes (Galloway, 2012 p31-33, p51; Drucker 2014, 157-158; 177; Bratton 2015, p229).
Web applications like Facebook, news and information sites like Wikipedia, search engines like Google, and streaming content sites like YouTube or Spotify all deploy application programming interfaces (API’s) that are driven by software and hardware programming languages; algorithms, network principles and data classification systems; and HCI engineering and design protocols. Each of which house their own instances of interface within an application’s programmed purpose. In short, interface is never just a screen, it is always an enacted multi-textual and multi-authored phenomenon manifest by a multitude of social actors and interests at various points within experienced and obfuscated processes.
Interface also pervade and intrude upon us in less obvious ways, the structure of say, a research thesis, as well, is a form of interface. A process of translating information. The SFU institution, indeed the School of Communication, are each their own layer of interface, their own filter for knowledge. Identity too, is a knowledge filter. Where again interface proliferate, as the available modes of being and associative cultural objects and subjects within a society construct the parameters for identity and as such, for knowing.
Subsequently, much of what we do, how we communicate, read, see and experience our everyday realities has become increasingly mediated by ever abstracted systems of representation offered by various forms of interface technologies. Thus, interface act as powerful disclosing agents for collective knowledge and social relations. These technologies, be they material or discursive, are value laden and entangled with social and cultural programs of a given subject/world; projecting particular figurations of human subjectivity and ontological horizons. We live within and through these components. They habituate our bodies and demand particular performances of us for engagement.
Due to the way interface act as points of integration into larger more complex, socio-technic systems of society, who we are within these political structures become important sites for study and intervention. This research has unfolded alongside what some have called unprecedented or ‘biblical’ cultural and global developments. The United States 2016 election, the UK’s abrupt exit from the European Union, the rise of extremist political groups, ever advancing environmental catastrophes, a resurgence of identity politics, ongoing protests for environmental and racial injustice, and a global pandemic have all occurred during the course of this project. Likewise, an explosion of scholarly interest and critique emerged in reference to the internet and its subsequent role in the aforementioned socio-political ruptures.
Rigorous analysis have been made with regards to the way the data and network practices that underlie internet experience exacerbate inequalities and oppression by the contributions of Safiya Umoja Noble (2018), Virgina Eubanks (2018), Ruha Benjamin (2019), danah boyd (2012; 2018; 2019), Kim Crawford (2012) and Cathy O’Neil (2016); as well, Nick Sckrinek (2017), Tarleton Gillespie (2018), Taina Bucher (2018), and Sarah T Roberts (2019) have all pointed to the power of platform technologies to alter (and impede) public discourse and cultural production. Scholars like Angela Nagle (2017), Yochai Benkler (2018), Rebecca Lewis (2018), Whitney Phillips (2018), and Siva Vaudhyanathan (2018) have shown how this media landscape has been coopted by political extremists and undermined democracy. All of this work manifest within the whirlwind of the last 4 years, has rightfully and crucially highlighted how the libertarian dreams of Silicon Valley, have produced a spiralling socio-political nightmare.
This project builds off these insights collectively and departs from their constructivist and deconstructivist approaches, as well as, moves away from scholarly tendencies to map, dissect, critique or pathologize, the effects of interface technologies. While these insights and approaches are vitally important, if we are to learn anything from our contemporary moment, it is that what is being demanded of us is a dynamic and profound shift that cannot be grappled with by the adjustment of mere methodological or epistemological standpoints; not by way of mere inclusions of additional “data”; through solely the inclusion of female, queer or Black and Indigenous voices—for they have always already been present and wailing. Crucially, this work recognizes that though biblical times for some, for others with arguably longer living relations and ancestral memory, the apocalypse has long already been upon us. Life has already been, for upwards of 6 centuries, a living death. Thus, this project asserts that what is being demanded of us is a fundamental shift in how we orient ourselves toward knowledge and knowledge-making in light of, indeed, in motion with, these voices. Read: the problem before us isn’t one of information, but ontology.
Interface blurs the lines of reality, imposing particular configurations of human subjectivity and agency, and warping our sense of collectivity and interconnectedness. To study such a phenomenon outside of it, is to disengage from and under examine these lived and embodied effects completely. Nobody exists outside of the effects of globally networked society; indeed, we encounter and live out its repercussions daily. Thus, from the outset, this project has concerned itself with just this gap in research. Committing to a certain refusal to separate theory from practice, and most certainly a refusal to separate identity from scholarship, it instead engages practices of thinking with and from within imaginaries antithetical to representational models: namely, through nonbinary theorizing and decolonial commitments.
First, drawing on the work of Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (2006; 2011; 2016; 2018; 2021), Tara McPherson (2018), Ruha Benjamin (2019), Simone Browne (2015), Virginia Eubanks (2018), Sharene Razack (2015), Ariella Azoulay (2019) and Karen Barad (2007), in The Fever: Mirrors, Maps, and Sameness: The Representational Model, it shows how the development of computational systems has emerged out of a liberal representationalist model of thought, predicated on a master/slave dynamic that subjugates difference and is dependent upon segregated and discriminatory practices mimetic, in theory and practice, to colonial regimes of imperiality and gendered and racialized Otherness. Such deep roots within a colonial system of knowledge and habit of being reveal how mirrors, maps, and sameness, baked in processes by which we come to understand our world and each-other, are the byproduct of “New World” agendas that relegate (and as such, depoliticizes) present/future violence to the past and foreclose our ability to respond to our historical inheritance.
The violence and destruction of the rigid ubiquity of such “universal” systems plagues nearly every sector of our world: be it by information silo and communicative echo chamber; institutionalized research framework and metrics for “success”; modulatory disciplinary rhetoric and citation politics; or democratic or other collectively held public imaginaries for togetherness—the imperiality of these systems in all their enunciative authority presents a fictitious “everybody”; “people; or “subject” that brackets away and effectively sanctions the experience of others’, both their violence and potentialities (Azoulay, 2019 p.5). Thus, this work seeks to deliberate undo and trouble the stories behind such ontological habitus by disrupting its givenness at all three aforementioned levels.
Second, due to the way interface in its present form, forecloses imaginaries and ontological horizons, estranges identity from being—fixing what is actually a performative multiplicity, and filters the self through a both metaphorical and technically prescriptive screen; it has no means of engaging difference as a self-collective relation. It prefigures agency through an illusion of control, that in the wake of global pandemics, rising sea levels, polarized publics, and pollutant information landscapes, is laid bare. So accustomed to its prefigured plans and narratives, this sudden disjointedness from a cultural and existential center provides an unprecedented ontological opening. Thus, I engage directly the space in-between, the rupture, brought about by this moment and the offerings of pre- and decolonial, Indigenous, nonbinary, and non-western philosophy and thought.
It situates its approach through the theoretical landscape offered by, in The Wound, Emmanuel Levinas (1989; 1990), Enrique Dussel (1995), Anibal Quijano (2007), Franz Fanon (1986), Maldanado-Torres (2007; 2016), Walter Mignolo (2000; 2013), and Jose Salvidar (2007); and in Rituals for Healing: Judith Butler (1988), Karen Barad (2007), Sarah Ahmed (2006), Audre Lorde (1984), and Gloria Anzaldúa (2014); here also, it aligns its mission with the work of Vanessa Andreotti and those practicing at the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective. My creative practice in Blackfish Rising has also been influenced by the Sunday Sermons of Janaya Future Khan[1] and is inspired by the work of artists such as, Dani E’Emilia, and the writings and poetry of Leanne Betasomasake Simpson, Alicia Elliot, Ocean Vuong, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Rita Wong and Fred Wah. The collective presence and conocimiento offered by these individuals have laid the foundation for my autofictive and poetics based methods in Blackfish Rising.
Rather unapologetically, I make traversing this project via institutionalized norms and expectations[2], tedious; I have found the normalized research thesis structure limiting, suffocating, and incompatible with commitments to social and cultural change. Should the format and presentation of this research aggravate or otherwise trouble the reader, rest assured this is very much the point. I am not asking your permission to transgress formalities, I am directly condemning and subverting their assumed (read: undoubtedly marked) neutrality. I deliberately reject the authority of authorship and problematics of objective translations of research processes by quite literally, taking audiences with me through the entire bodily writing process.
I do not divorce my experience from my research, but rather make every effort of weaving the specificities of it into the work itself as means of more intimately understanding the layered and entangled performativity of difference. I do not separate emotion, spirituality, or identity from my work, as doing so would only serve to extend the status quo of severing such embodied and experiential knowledge, from reality--delegitimizing of a host of other ways of knowing and our common human experience. Such defaults have only served to concretize and cement over historical trauma, projecting and protecting the fiction that coloniality and its violence has no spatial or temporal continuity and can as such be, albeit with forbearance and pacifying acknowledgement, archived.
Thus, this work presents, in closing, that intervention must directly engage where such histories play out most readily, within bodies and across borders. It queers boundaries and suggests that togetherness, like rules, is always already within. Furthermore, it exemplifies, how a return to the body makes plain the decoupling of emotions from politics, pedagogy, and knowledge is not only a violent affront and obstruction to notions of equitability, justice, regeneration, and collectivity; but also a perversion of our collectively held communicative and reciprocal human condition. So, in order to intervene upon the world, to manifest change and de-orient habituated colonial ontologies that manifest our in interface technologies and likewise in social relations, we must decalcify our uniquely human capability to creatively dream. This begins first and foremost, by grappling with and understanding the depth of coloniality’s reach within ourselves.
So, I invite you to partake in reading and engaging with this work in whatever way suits you. Should the reader find themselves unfamiliar with current critical media studies landscape and desiring concrete framework with which to link interface, identity, and representational ontology I suggest beginning with The Fever: Mirrors, Maps, and Sameness: The Representational Model. This provides an overview of the critical media studies, algorithmic studies, and science and technology studies that have informed this work.
Should the reader be interested in the pivot away from “traditional” canons of critical theory, the coloniality of being, and the decolonial turn I suggest beginning with The Wound: On the Coloniality, of the Cartesian-Colonial habit of being. Here, I provide a basis for understanding how colonial non-ethics of war and imperiality frame knowledge and “modern” education, and situate the decolonial turn as the necessary antithesis neglected by western philosophy and contemporary theorizing of interface.
For nonbinary theorizing and models for manifesting a decolonial horizon, see Rituals for Healing: Disorienting ontology: queer performance, decoloniality & fiction, fissures and cracks. Here I lay the foundation for my methods and illustrate how the educative discomfort and disorientation offered by fictive and poetic writing can support a generative stream of connections that viscerally activates a sense of relationality, entanglement, responsibility and care.
For more in-depth details on my methods see Blackfish Rising chapters and Becoming Blackfish respectively. If you want to feel your way through, begin with the former, for the author’s process, reflections, and insights first, begin with the latter. For my research reflection and next steps, see the Closing Meditation: Manifesting the Bridge: Blackfish, Art, and coalition building through creative performance.
If you, despite all of the above, would still prefer the ground linearity seemingly provides, read sequentially in the order I have listed. For full project cartographies (or: “table of contents”) and navigation please see the Navigation Diagram and section appendices pdf.
[1] Khan is a Black Lives Matter ambassador, storyteller and activist from LA.
[1] Readers may find the length of this MA thesis to surpass institutionalized requirements and may be inclined to object or request condensation of its elements. To such positions this work states the following: I am here because academics is supposed to be about public service, about bettering society; and this is the one place I can take the problems faced by my community and receive the resources, guidance, and intellectual autonomy (in theory) to research solutions. I am here to uplift my community. The length of this thesis speaks more to the ways I wanted to make a degree of this work accessible to those outside of academics, to reach those otherwise barred from this opportunity and experience. The narrative structure of my methods takes the place of typical research practice, which means I don't have a summarized research analysis section typical of a standard thesis, this in tangent with the fact that one of the purposes of the project was to be inclusive of a non academic audience during the research process, means my methods section is much longer than typical theses. More pointedly, the length stipulation as a measure of the research thesis, is itself a colonial object. Condensation purely for the sake of upholding these standards projects and supports the exact kind of knowledge that this thesis from the start, has set out to undermine and depart.. Hence, I ask, that to the best of your ability, in order to engage authentically in this offering for unlearning, you leave, as they say, your colonial habits “at the door”. Lastly, to think ‘we’, students, perceive ourselves as having ‘time’ to pursue interests further, goes against all of the impositions we as young people are contending with in the world. We might ‘have time’ if weren’t implicated by racist, sexist and imperialist agendas that subjugate and distort our own experiences; we might ‘have time’ if we weren’t bearing the weight of our ancestors, of our polluted environment and cultural inheritance; we might ‘have time’ if we remain complacent within privilege—but even this, is an illusion: the only time we can ever have or possess, is now. Normalize changing research standards for students, do not to contain them within templates but create space for their expansiveness. Let young people lead and dismantle barriers to experiences of difference. Concern yourselves with how you are creating space for change, not upholding habits of colonial institutions.