Creative Conversations: Legacy Russell with André Brock Jr.

Tuesday, October 20 | 6PM 

Glitch Feminism and Digital Technoculture
Focused on the intersections of race, gender, identity, and contemporary digital technoculture, the participant’s conversation will draw from their research-based practices and recent writings to illuminate the ways technology and digital platforms are used both to uphold systemic oppression by hegemonic forces, as well as offering liberatory tools and structures made for/by BIPOC communities.

Curator and writer Legacy Russell’s latest book, Glitch Feminism (Verso, 2020), is a vital new chapter in cyberfeminism, one that explores the relationship between gender, technology and identity. In an urgent manifesto, Russell reveals the many ways that the glitch performs and transforms: how it refuses, throws shade, ghosts, encrypt, mobilizes and survives. Developing the argument through memoir, art and critical theory, Russell also looks at the work of contemporary artists who travel through the glitch in their work. Timely and provocative, Glitch Feminism shows how an error can be a revolution.

Academic and author André Brock Jr.’s recently released publication Distributed Blackness: African American Cyber Cultures proposes that issues surrounding race and ethnicity are inextricable from and formative of contemporary digital culture in the United States. Distributed Blackness analyzes a host of platforms and practices (from Black Twitter to Instagram, YouTube, and app development) to trace how digital media have reconfigured the meanings and performances of African American identity. Brock moves beyond widely circulated deficit models of respectability, bringing together discourse analysis with a close reading of technological interfaces to develop nuanced arguments about how “blackness” gets worked out in various technological domains.

About the guests
Legacy Russell is a curator, writer, and artist. Born and raised in New York City, she is the Associate Curator of Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Russell holds a dual-major B.A. with Honors from Macalester College in Art History & Studio Art and English & Creative Writing with a focus in Gender Studies, and an MRes with Distinction in Art History from Goldsmiths, University of London with a focus in Visual Culture. Her academic, curatorial, and creative work focuses on gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new media ritual.

Curated exhibitions and projects include Projects 110 : Michael Armitage, organized with Thelma Golden and The Studio Museum in Harlem at MoMA (2019); Dozie Kanu : Function (2019), Chloë Bass : Wayfinding (2019), and Radical Reading Room (2019) at The Studio Museum in Harlem; MOOD : Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2018-19 at MoMA PS1; GLITCH @ NIGHT; and a series of multimedia events exploring digital feminism and celebrating queer nightlife at ICA London (2017); and the critically acclaimed Wandering/WILDING: Blackness on the Internet in collaboration with IMT Gallery and ICA London (2016). Amongst other institutional projects, Russell is currently working on organizing with Thelma Golden and The Studio Museum in Harlem Projects: Garrett Bradley, a presentation of the artist and filmmaker's multichannel video installation, "America" (2019) forthcoming at MoMA in 2020. She is also working on the This Longing Vessel: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2019-20 which will feature the work of E. Jane, Elliot Reed, and Naudline Pierre, to be presented at MoMA PS1 Winter 2020.

Russell’s written work, interviews, and essays have been published internationally. She is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation 2019 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art and a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency Fellow. Her first book Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020) is published by Verso Books.

André L. Brock is Associate Professor of Black Digital Studies at Georgia Institute of Technology in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication. He is an interdisciplinary scholar with an M.A. in English and Rhetoric from Carnegie Mellon University and a Ph.D. in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His scholarship includes published articles on racial representations in videogames, black women and weblogs, whiteness, blackness, and digital technoculture, as well as groundbreaking research on Black Twitter. His article “From the Blackhand Side: Twitter as a Cultural Conversation” challenged social science and communication research to confront the ways in which the field preserved “a color-blind perspective on online endeavors by normalizing Whiteness and othering everyone else” and sparked a conversation that continues, as Twitter, in particular, continues to evolve. His most recent book, Distributed Blackness: African American Cyber Cultures was published by NYU Press in 2020.