On allowing your role to shift

Tell me about HERVISIONS, a femme-focused curatorial agency.

I really like hacking the system, making space where there isn’t space for marginalized voices. I’ve noticed how we have to exist [in multitudes], and the digital space allows that. It’s [where] more femme, or queer, and even neurodivergent perspectives intersect.

Something that I’ve been trying to encapsulate through HERVISIONS is the outsider, the underdog. People that are undermined. I feel like I am constantly undermined in my ability because I’m a woman of color from a low socioeconomic background. My lived experience informs my practice. I want to be able to help other people like me. I’ve been doing HERVISIONS for nearly 10 years now.

Wow, congratulations.

Thank you. [*laughs*] Yeah, it’s still not sustainable. I really want to become more…

Self-sufficient? Would that mean that you’re bringing in another voice?

I guess it’s more about the infrastructure. I’ve been working project to project.

A lot of creatives, in order to carve out space for themselves in an inaccessible industry, start up their own platforms, and they start with a lot of vim and energy. But then you realize that monetary support is few and far between.

Exactly.

It runs you down. It’s one of those things where, when you don’t have the building blocks, you start getting insular. But it’s still a living archive of the process that you went through to get where you are now.

You’re right. You start to become insular, and you start to equate success with your own value, and that becomes really problematic… It’s not conducive to any sustainability, personally or as a business model. So I don’t want to keep doing HERVISIONS the way that I have been. I’ve been thinking, “What can I do that’s manageable and that I enjoy?”

You don’t do this full time, right?

I’m teaching now, associate lecturing at Camberwell University of The Arts, for their Computational Arts MA.

What is it like passing that knowledge down?

You always surprise yourself on what comes out. What if a student comes to me and I don’t know what to say?

I think it’s okay to say you don’t know.

Exactly. There’s always something you can connect to. There’s different styles of teaching. Sometimes it is critique-based, other times it’s workshopping… I’m still finding my teaching practice. Alternative education is really, really important.

Alt Ed is the most important, to be honest. You have to be adaptable and elastic. Do you teach anything practical in that class?

Good question. Because I’m coming from a more curatorial background—even though I’ve worked with digital tools for world-building with live-action, post-animation, or post-internet aesthetic effects—tools move so quickly. My curatorial practice has been one of collaboration, and intersecting with artistic mediums and practices that are still being developed. In Computational Arts there’s a lot of gaming engines, creative coding…

What’s creative coding?

Using Python or JavaScript, or p5.js. Anything digital is going to have some sort of code. If you can get into the backend and hack it, you can adapt [and] be creative with how you’re coding it. Now you can also use AI tools like ChatGPT to tell you the code. But you get into this really tricky area of ethics versus creativity versus accessibility versus resources… I feel like I’m constantly ping-ponging between that.

Are you talking about AI when you’re talking about ethics?

Well, all of it. If you’re using things like Spark AR, which is now closed and which was owned by Meta—Meta are just trying to capitalize on the way that we use the tool, our data, the artworks, the work that’s produced. The production of that work is still owned by them. They want to be able to have access to the collective consciousness, ultimately, and then teach AI how to replicate.

There is a lot of anxiety about phasing out anything organic. I definitely want to talk about the environmental impact of tech, but I wanted to go back to the queering of tech, and neurodivergence. How can tech can be made ready for people with learning disabilities, given that they are pushed to the peripheries in a lot of standard education contexts?

My theory is that the tech actually feeds into neurodivergence through the attention economy. So, how do we move away from that? You have to foster these tools to be able to create offline environments for people to connect in real time, in real life. Legacy Russell talks in Glitch Feminism about AFK: Away From Keyboard reality. There is this hybridity of having to exist offline… Artists Caroline Sinders and Romy Gad el Rab are doing a residency at the Delfina Foundation about mental health and how we can create digital interfaces to be more supportive of different needs and abilities.

For me, I have dyslexia and I get very anxious when I see something and the interface doesn’t match how my brain can read it.

Exactly. You’re like, “Oh my god. Where do I even look?”

When I was at university and I did the dyslexic test, at the end they tested filters to see what color I read best in. I read best in pink, actually.

[*laughs*] That is cool!

I think most people respond to color, but hyper-capitalist cities just pull all the color out of everything, and when you go to somewhere like Mexico, or Cuba, and there’s color everywhere, you are automatically more jubilant and excited… A lot of coding spaces are black background and white text, or yellow text, or whatever.

That’s why the integration of NLP, Natural Language Programs, [are important]. Technology is developing now beyond just the formulas of binary codes. Romy Gad, the psychologist and artist, works with people that have addictions to technology. People can know the standard thing—”It’s bad for your mental health because you’re going to get addicted to dopamine”—but we don’t know the actual ins and outs of that, in [our] buzzword culture.

We simplify down to, “A + B = bad.” But we don’t actually know how to tackle or move past it. So artists, social thinkers, and psychologists are important to collaborate with. What have you learned about collaborating? What makes for a harmonious environment for positive collaboration?

Collaboration is a practice in itself. You have to play to your strengths. And by practice, I mean there needs to be an understanding that it has to be a mutual benefit for everyone involved. Also, being realistic of the outcomes is so important.

I think being realistic is [about] making manageable phases and not seeing everything as a finite outcome. You can try to have more bite-sized approaches to things. You can say, “We’re just going to prototype this, and then if it works, then we can develop it further.”

Is there anything that you would avoid when collaborating? Something you’ve maybe learned that’s gone wrong?

My expectations. It’s what you impose on yourself, and the people that you’re working with. Also I think the parameters, or the frameworks of what the collaborations are, or what everyone’s role is should be, should be clear from the beginning.

Things can just run away with themselves. I really try to impose some sort of structure of what’s important, or the expectations within roles, and making sure that everyone understands their roles. But also openness around how those roles can shift; allowing for a little bit of that is also part of the magic. It’s like creative contingency, knowing that that’s what happens. Things don’t go the way you started. So being able to foresee that contingency, but seeing it as a positive.

I’ve definitely learned that when I’m under pressure, I’m not always the nicest person. I try to face that in myself and be honest with other people.

I think it’s hard when you’re coming from a place of having to drive these things. When you’re like, “But if I don’t do this, no one else is going to do it. It’s my responsibility to do this, to get this done, and I have to pull people in.” If you’re the project lead, it comes from wanting everything to be perfect. But what I’ve learned is expecting a “no,” or expecting things to not be as you want, is a practice as well. Having that discipline to be able to step back. That is really learning about yourself.

Do you have a favorite digital work or physical piece of yours?

The project I did with the William Morris Gallery, “Wild Wired!,” felt very much like, “Ah, everything makes sense.” It was a site-specific digital intervention about rethinking the future of Langthorne Park in Leytonstone. It was a way to activate the local communities and introduce some sort of artwork connected to the William Morris Gallery’s Radical Landscapes exhibition. It was a project that combined community engagement, artist-led workshops, and digital technologies. We produced a site-specific, mobile-friendly game that you could access right in the park. It was accessible through scanning banners in the park. We were thinking about the park as a body—which was inspired by Taoism—and thinking about the medicinal properties of the plants in the park, and how they would impact our speculative future organs. We had different workshops where we asked artists, the community, and local residents to think about speculative organs. They did collages and we did writing and photography exercises.

These methods of world-building were then intertwined into a narrative, which then was produced into a body of work—which was the game, a 3D-printed artwork, an interactive website, and a moving image piece. That was really a huge amount of work.

It felt like everything clicked together for me. There were a lot of milestones within that project and there were a lot of production difficulties in terms of things not working the way we wanted, and that’s always what happens in technology. So it was just constantly problem solving.

That’s also a good skill you have to be able to hone whenever you’re doing these types of things: being a problem solver. My last point is about the environment. I think and hope that more people are coppin’ onto the environmental cost of tech, in terms of how much water usage there is to cool all these database storage centers down… Basically, without water, there wouldn’t be any tech. But how can we care more for the environment? What are your feelings about that?

I think this idea of reclaiming space and rewilding is an interesting way to think about it. The thing is, technical devices use a lot of mined minerals and components from the earth that we need for our smartphones. There’s a lot of reliance on nature, and how do we manage that? Gosh, I wish I had the answer.

AI is really, really, really environmentally unfriendly, but then also crypto, blockchain… There was a lot of fuss about NFTs not being ethical or environmentally friendly—which, yes, there is a massive usage of energy that blockchain takes. But the proportion of that which the creative industries use, in relation to other industries that use blockchain, is also a very small amount. I feel like there needs to be more transparency [from larger] capitalist companies.

I feel like artists, or creatives are just such little cogs in the system.

I think, though, that 10,000 small cogs make up a ton. We do have a part to play.