System Errors: Abolitionist Technologies and Aesthetics

A panel discussion with American Artist, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Juliana Huxtable and Legacy Russell. The radical potential of technologies lies in fugitivity and opacity: their ability to obscure, to make it impossible for us to be known, to render us untraceable by every arm of the state even under the all-consuming spectre of surveillance capital. Within the current matrix of violent governance, the abolitionist project is about gaming the algorithm: rewriting its rules and scrambling the encoded binary. Glitch feminism is one such method. It recognises the glitch as a necessary erratum, a site of positive departure that enables the creation of new worlds. With curator and writer Legacy Russell in the chair, artists and musicians American Artist, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and Juliana Huxtable, discuss their artistic practices through an abolitionist lens, considering questions around policing, the body and the digital image. How does art engaging with queerness, digital media and performance intersect with an abolitionist aesthetics of liberated blackness? Can networked virtual life, video games and radical image-making be tools for agency and resistance against the techno-industrial complex? Revolution is not a one-time is a programme organised by Che Gossett, Lola Olufemi and Sarah Shin in collaboration with Arika and hosted by Silver Press.