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Gilmore, Katherine
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Spring 2025
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2025
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9810_Gabriel_Boyd.pdf
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The internet is not neutral, and to conceptualize a digital future means the apolitical (white) avatar of the transhumanist of old is no longer a viable model of longing. But if one seeks to envision a Black virtual existence, one must ask what happens when blackness becomes uploaded. Unfortunately, case studies of various internet celebrities and memes teach us that control of digital visage wains upon integration, and even when that loss of control is utilized to the benefit of the person, iteration of digital self still ultimately swears fealty to the digital status quo. What I propose through my work is a future for black flesh that bubbles, throbs, and is uploaded to the cloud. But the cloud is not free, nor are the rare earth metals that fuel the devices that get us there. Hundreds of years of racial baggage lie in the fiber optic cable of an Ethernet connection, a passage to the beyond in which the self must be compressed to meet its data constraint. Hair becomes a juncture, an alternative passage of information - a jerry-rigged solution to the inevitability of the USB port. I offer an alternative destined to fail in its execution of transference, a scenario in which the body is unable to fully upload due to its baggage, its blackness, its queerness, corruption, a virus unable to breach the mainframe of the system with proper virus protection.
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