Digital World Building _An Act of Resistance
November 19th,
5 - 7 PM EST via ZOOM

RSVP Required

Digital World Building: _An act of resistance will explore the process to reconstruct digital and 3D design into tools for community and world building URL and AFK (away from keyboard). As a group we will discuss the dichotomy of navigating social media, despite its relentless surveillance, as sites for community organizing and how this influences our abilities to reimagine, speculate and manifest alternative futures, meanwhile existing in the present. Our discussion will preface a brief introduction and collaborative work session using Blender, a free open-source 3D software.

This workshop is suitable for participants 13+ years or older. Beginner to immediate level computer and social media skills are suggested. Please download Blender at blender.org before joining the workshop. To personalize your designs during the group work session, Adobe Illustrator or a substitute software and/or website to create .svg files is highly recommended.

Suggested Focus Materials

_text**
‘I Say Tear It All Down’: Curator Legacy Russell on How ‘Glitch Feminism’ Can Be a Tool to Radically Reimagine the World
The Ambient Well by Hawa Arsala

_artist talks**
Encrypted Enclosures//Glitching Visibility: Zach Blas in Conversation with Legacy Russell
Danielle Brathwaite Shirley, kamra and Myles E Johnson \\\[Artist Talk\\\] at black beyond _origins

About the Moderator:
JAZSALYN’s (she/her/hers) work begins where fiction and reality collide. As an anti-disciplinary artist, she combines new media and community organizing practice to reimagine black futures.

As a participating Artist and Director of black beyond, a radical space for artists and activists to define alternate realities for blackness, JAZSALYN collaborates with black and non-black co-liberators to decolonize and re-indigenize social and creative practice. Through black beyond, she curates a series of workshops, artist talks, exhibitions, performances, as well as a monthly segment titled alternate realities on Dublab Radio.

Her work has been featured in CULTURED Magazine, Vogue, The New Yorker, and Huffington Post. Exhibitions and panels such as the Wheaton Biennial, Abolition Planning and Afrofuturism at Pratt Institute, black beyond _origins on New Art City and Textiles as a Second Skin at MoogFest.

JAZSALYN is a current member of the Extended Realities cohort at NEW INC in The New Museum. As well as a faculty member in the Design and Technology program at Parsons School of Design, where she teaches a studio course on speculative design and techno origins. *Her preferred name is unicase and omits last name for decolonial purposes.

Support black beyond's efforts to amplify the work of underrepresented artists in their upcoming exhibition _assembly, alchemy, ascension at the Kellen Gallery in New York, NY, for Spring 2022. *All donations are tax deductible via New York Foundation for the Arts.

VISIT
black beyond _origins, an XR experience reimagining black femme futures.

FOLLOW
blackbeyond.xyz
Instagram @jazsalyn @blackbeyond_
Twitter @blackbeyond_

This program was made in congruence with Dark Data, curated by Gee Wesley with curatorial fellows Bianca Dominguez and Mae Miller, featuring American Artist, Hannah Black, Stephanie Dinkins, E. Jane, Mimi Ọnụọha, Sondra Perry which was held from September 11 - October 30, 2021 at EFA Project Space.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Dark Data presents the work of six artists who explore pervasive forms of data collection, mass-surveillance, and hypervisibility visited upon Black life through technologies of predictive policing, data-mining, algorithmic violence, and artificial intelligence. The project situates these emergent data technologies within a broader lineage of anti-Black surveillance and quantification. Dark Data highlights a host of artistic and social tactics exercised by Black practitioners to actively respond to these conditions through experimental archival strategies, inventive modes of technological encryption, and gestures of digital worldmaking.

Presented with PWRPLNT

POWRPLNT is a space where the digital arts community engages the next generation of creators. It functions as gallery space, internet lounge and an environment where people from all backgrounds may learn the skills necessary to express themselves creatively in today’s networks. We aim to make the digital world accessible, personal and more human. For more information visit: https://www.powrplnt.org/