Internet as Archipelago
Olivia McKayla Ross interviewed by Darla Migan
Courtesy Olivia McKayla Ross
Caribbean-American programmer-poet Olivia McKayla Ross and I met over the internet and then talked on the phone for many hours before holding this IRL interview. We discussed her video practice and her coining of the term Cyberdoula, reaching into the concept of data trauma and thinking about the necessity of care work across transmission cultures. Through her mermaid nymph water mythos, Ross explores modalities of the wave as she applies slit scan techniques to create textures that express her feelings of navigating the Internet as a colonized archipelago.—Darla Migan
Darla Migan: You describe yourself as a video artist, programmer, and poet. I wonder if we can expand on how this has come about?
Olivia McKayla Ross: It happened quickly. I was a high schooler and then I was a working artist. As I graduated high school in 2019 I spent a lot of time in New York art community spaces like BUFU and the School for Poetic Computation.
DM: What is BUFU?
OMR: By Us For Us: a collective of Black and Asian friends and queer people, a documentary collective that's been working on a distributed, decentralized documentary project for the last couple of years. But they also do community engagement projects every summer. They started Cloud Nine during the pandemic, which was basically an online platform for people to find community, to keep each other safe, share resources, share mutual aid, but also to take classes and be in community. A lot of their work stems from their mission of pan-Black pan-Asian solidarity, and that's what their documentary is about. I helped a little bit with making their website.
DM: How did you get involved with BUFU?
OMR: I met them a few weeks before my graduation. On the day of my graduation I got on a plane to Minneapolis to be a student volunteer at a conference. While I was there, BUFU was presenting and I was assigned to their panel. I was super nosy, asking them, like, do they need any water? Is your mic setup right? etc. And then we ended up talking. They said, well, if you're based in New York, find us, we're doing this WYFY (With You For You) school in the summer. It was a decentralized summer school, taught by community members, about whatever they felt was necessary knowledge to share on a variety of different topics. I think someone taught a class about dumpster diving, and I taught a class about cyberfeminism.
DM: How did you design your course on cyberfeminism?
OMR: I was in the midst of piecing together what cyberfeminism meant to me. And I hadn’t read the Cyborg Manifesto. I'm actually reading it this week for a cybernetics book club that I'm doing with my friends. It’s going to be my first time reading it.
What we're doing is we have a text and we have a counter text, each time. This week we're reading the Cyborg Manifesto, but we're also reading Countersexual Manifesto by Paul Preciado, which includes his own take on the Cyborg Manifesto. Cyberfeminism came about when I was first crystallizing my thoughts and feelings about data, imperialism and the internet—what it meant to participate in all of it. That class is where I came up with the vocabulary of “data trauma,” because I was wondering how to teach this concept to someone.
Similarly, the concept of a cyber doula was something that I'd come up with for that class in order to communicate what was in my head. We read the Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century (1991) by VNS Matrix. We made our own digital avatars, our own cyberfeminist superheroes. In general we were sharing and talking around the idea of data trauma for the first time and what it can look like for different people.
Olivia McKayla Ross, THAT GIRL (2020). Video experiment. 00:15 minutes
DM: I know that you recently changed your handle, and then you changed it back. Why?
OMR: I changed my title to cyberdoula. Before the handle, my username was just my government name.
DM: When was that?
OMR: Summer of 2019. When I came up with the idea of a cyber doula, I envisioned it as a community role, to give vocabulary to a person who takes on a form of care work. It wasn't meant to be a stage name. Initially, I thought of it as a great way to make the idea enter the public discourse.
I think now I understand a little better that, despite what I wanted, the title is kind of synonymous with my Instagram presence itself. But my Twitter is a totally different user name and just my space to talk.
DM: I like that you’re saying title and not username. Do you want to share your Twitter handle?
OMR: It's mermaidwar. I really love the idea of myth, and creating myths. I like myth as a literary style, it's really fun and funky. There's a sense of wonder associated with myth when you read it. It’s something that I'm interested in, writing-wise, and as a texture for making video work as well.
DM: I’m interested in your not having read the Cyborg Manifesto as someone calling themselves a Cyber Doula, as a self identified Caribbean-American programmer poet in 2021. I wonder if you have a sense of generational difference in your reading life?
OMR: It's not like the Cyborg Manifesto is out of style… When I was trying to envision the kind of career I wanted for myself, I was looking to find the Black women who were writing about it. l had access to Mimi Ọnụọha’s work, Simone Browne, and Ruha Benjamin. I read the work of these women very early on. Cyborg Manifesto was on my list, but I still have so much to read. My introduction to critical theory was through Audre Lorde and Caribbean women writers of the ‘60s and ‘70s and later, like June Jordan, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Catherine McKittrick, and Sylvia Wynter, who I actually found through manuel abreu’s class.1 I also really like Kamau Braithwaite’s poetry. I was very interested in literary Caribbean cultural production. I feel that the Caribbean is a very useful place to start to think about concepts like Island making and marronage and how these apply to the internet and transmission culture. I'm thinking a lot about the internet as an archipelago and what that means. Specifically as a colonized archipelago, it’s really a big part of my work now. I’ve allowed myself to be guided by Caribbean philosophy when thinking about cybernetics.
DM: This is so great because the art world loves to keep colonizing. What do you mean by transmission culture?
OMR: I was thinking about this phrase when it comes to art and technology. The thing that I've been most interested in is video and this idea of tele-vision in a pure sense: the transmission of visions to people across space and time. I think a lot about how the way we send information to each other has changed in this context of capitalism, starting not even from the dot-com boom, but radio and television itself, and how that changed society. I see a book behind you titled The Technical Delusion, which I read and reread, by Jeffrey Sconce. I think the subtitle is “Electronics, Power, Insanity.” They talk about how, with the introduction of television and radio to society, hundreds of thousands of people were calling their psychiatrists and saying things like, “My television has been projecting images into my brain while I sleep.” All of these technology-driven anxieties and DSM-V delusions2 and teenage girls who hear celebrities singing over the radio and think that they’re personal messages of love directed at them. I think about that time period and how it's kind of the same today. People still think that influencers and celebrities are in love with them. This is a more evidence-based claim nowadays, for example with people thinking that their electronics are actively listening to them. That's not such a ridiculous fear, even though it's pretty computationally expensive for someone to be actually listening to you. They don't need to do that to do the things that they're doing.
I just think that transmission culture is a useful way to talk about a specific phenomenon in society. I’m thinking of something a bit different than VNS Matrix, who originally coined the idea of a “data, industrial, imperial environment.” I want to be more specific when talking about the different ways that our society has shifted under electronics. This has also made me want to be more specific when I'm using the terms technology and electronics. Cultural historian Jeffrey Sconce talks about the politics of electricity. Technology, for me, is a very vague word. Which is often a good thing—it’s capacious. Conversation is a form of technology, right? It's just a way of doing, it's not necessarily electronic. We've had surveillance technologies for way longer than we’ve had electronics. As long as we've had watch towers and guard towers, we've had surveillance.
I spent some time at the School for Poetic Computation after the summer of BUFU. That was really the space where I came up with my first artist statement. It talked about trust and faith as aesthetics and materials, and about faith economies in the metaphoric landscape of cyberspace, how faith is used aesthetically. We asked which (web)pages feel legitimate and why. What is the graphic design of legitimacy and what informs that? I still think about it, but that’s not what my artist statement says anymore.
Olivia McKayla Ross, Body Resolution. Mixed media
Olivia McKayla Ross, I HATE YOU SO MUCH (2020). Video experiment. 00:19 minutes
DM: I’d like to go back to the mermaidwar handle because I’m recalling my own experience of the mythos of the emergence of the Internet by way of military innovation.
OMR: Black Girl in the Pool is the title of something I’m currently writing. I'm thinking about water and cybernetics. Not just the physical material, but the cultural imagination around water, the aesthetic imagination of it as well, and how it can help us understand new ways of interacting with data. I was thinking about that with this idea of mermaids. I was really tickled by all of the meanings of the word wave—electronic waves, waves in the ocean, but also waving at a friend—and how all of those waves are actually still the same word.
It's not like meanings shift, it's just that context has shifted. I was thinking about the oceanic will—Jackie Wang wrote an essay titled “Oceanic Feeling and Communist Affect.” I just learned what affect means, and I also just learned what semiotic means. Maybe oceanic feeling might help if we understand it in the sense of oneness and depth, of being part of something larger. I was just thinking about being a little mermaid nymph on the telephone line, and the sense of water as both a metaphor and the physical reality of the internet in terms of the transatlantic submerged cables.
DM: Can one go on Google Maps and look up the actual lines?
OMR: Yes. A lot of them are also above water on land, across islands. In the Philippines I know of one place where you can see them.
DM: That's so interesting, given various colonial histories as well as the sort of “original" settler colonialism, and the transatlantic slave trade.
OMR: Yeah, and also in terms of island nations, Africa, South America, and places in Asia that are the world's dumping grounds for electronic waste.
DM: This seems so far away from how I came to be introduced to something called post-internet art.
OMR: I don’t know what that is. It seems very submerged in this aesthetic that I don't have any nostalgia for because I wasn't there. But I understand that it's Y2K.
DM: It’s bumping around the year 2000. That I would agree with.
OMR: And post-internet, I guess, is post- the beginning of the internet?
DM: It's supposed to be the after, rather—something that we’ve been within since then.
OMR: I think we should stop adding post to things. History is over. Also, the future is kind of over...
DM: Let's just slow that down. What do you mean by this?
OMR: I'm not the first to say it. People don't talk about current events as history anymore. Even when I think about art history, we started calling things modern a while ago, and now it's not modern anymore. So now we have a new word, contemporary. With cyberfeminism, a lot of the key texts are written by people who are anticipating the future, accelerationist readings like CCRU writings,3 like McKenzie Wark’s Hacker Manifesto, Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?, even though there are people writing about these ideas now. It’s interesting reading the arguments that feminists had with each other and how they disagreed. Things are messy and complicated. I feel like cyberfeminists don't argue with each other enough. I think a lot of it is because of capitalism: disagreeing is bad for clout, being a voice of dissent is bad for business. People who I feel are very radical thinkers still have bills to pay. When you have this livelihood of being a working artist you still need to be supported by institutions. We have not yet built community infrastructure to support artists like that. We're not Canada, Australia, or the UK, who have government funding for the arts (which are also in danger of being defunded every single year). We have to do things like make a Patreon or teach at a university, which can support you as much as they can silence you. Or you must have your work shown in a museum that has a very bloody colonial history and which is often directly related to the histories of your ancestors, the stolen belongings of your great great-ancestors.
DM: How did it feel to make My Teen Bedroom for your show at Transfer Gallery in Brooklyn (April 2022)?
OMR: I liked that title because it’s ironic, which I feel requires you to take something very seriously.
DM: I want to talk about this piece because it was a kind of debut moment for sharing your art. Could you talk about moving out of your family home during the pandemic and the anticipation of doing so?
OMR: I really like the technique of slit-scan. Originally it was a technique in experimental film. One of my mentors, Golan Levan, published a blog post of the history of the technique. I really like it as a different way of photographing movement. You have one slit that the camera looks through and then computationally takes the pixel from a certain segment of the camera, creating a drippy continuum of time and space, playing with pixels as its own kind of material. I wanted to use it in the video to communicate how time and space felt during the pandemic. I was thinking about ‘mad time’ from La Marr Jurelle Bruce’s “Interludes in Madtime: Black Music, Madness, and Metaphysical Syncopation,” and Kamau Braithwaithe’s teleological idea of Tidalectics. I was thinking about the invention of the timeline and in the process of making this video I was thinking about what it was like to be in my room and how best to capture that feeling. A symptom of depression is blurriness and I was thinking about how to communicate that.
I felt that contrasted with the ways I felt working on an experimental documentary project with my friend Jasmine. My bedroom now felt like I was contained by versus living in a place. It was not claustrophobia but a sensation that arises when you’ve been in the same space for a long time. I wanted to explore the contours and edges of that space and what I was doing there. The techniques I used in that video was one of the first times I was able to translate the more theoretical ideas I’ve been having into textures that can be seen and felt.
Olivia McKayla Ross, still from MY TEEN BEDROOM (2021). Video, sound. 03:19 minutes ⇾ watch here
Olivia McKayla Ross, WE WERE SOMETHING DON'T YOU THINK SO (2020). Video experiment. 00:58 minutes
OMR (cont.): The line between craft and commodity is very blurred. I don't want to conflate art with cyberfeminism. There are things that are in the cyberfeminist field that are not art. Just like the post-internet aesthetic that we're talking about is an art aesthetic, but it's also very popular in fashion, which makes me feel that it's more of a signifier of cultural nostalgia than it is related to the work that's being done. I want to see actual post-internet art, where the post is actually looking towards a future and not reviewing what has happened. I think maybe that's not the prefix I should use, because I learned recently that, for example, postcolonial is an analysis of stuff that's happened. It would be really interesting to see internet art that is post-something else than the internet.
Why is the future dead? I don't know. I can't give a good answer for that. I’m just really comfortable saying it, as a young person. But I also feel like I live and was raised in the time that everybody was dreaming about. And now it's here. I don't think my generation isn't dreaming about the future. At the same time, it looks like literal fire and apocalypse.
DM: Looks like that to me, too. We're 20 years apart, I think.
OMR: I think so, if you're around the same age as my eldest sister.
DM: I'm so excited to talk to you because it doesn't feel like there's 20 years between us. Given the kind of analysis that I've been doing in my own study, I actually feel we’re sympatico in ways that many people in my generation aren’t. We had a conversation a while ago, where I said I felt a realistic outlook from you, versus a young one.
OMR: I haven't been making work for that long. Most of my research and art practice began when the pandemic began. I was making work at the School for Poetic Computation in the fall of 2019, and in the winter of 2020 I was trying to figure out what my next move was. I was in limbo, beginning my own personal research, a transitional phase.
And then early 2020 was the beginning of the pandemic. It’s been time spent inside, reading lots of books and, well, also coexisting with a lot of grief, pain, and trauma due to the pandemic and also with Black Lives Matter—it's weird to even call it a resurgence, because I remember when BLM happened when I was in middle school, and I remember how it felt. This felt the same, though I was now older and could control the way I interfaced with it in a way that I could not when I was younger, because I didn't yet have the computer literacy. And the world at large didn't have computer literacy yet, figuring out how to participate in this hashtag and not traumatize Black children with unrestricted access to the internet.
The day Trayvon Martin died was the day I got my period for the first time. There was so much that I understood perfectly as well. Seeing that happen again and people being so much wiser about posting TWs. When I was in boarding school and Trump won the election, I had people to process that with. But at home during the pandemic, we didn’t have that conversation and I don’t think a lot of Black families do. Ranting in anger with my brother, we had those kinds of conversations, which is a form of processing but not of care. In reality the days went by very slowly and very quickly.
✸
Olivia McKayla Ross’ video iteration of her text LAKE OF STARS is featured in the exhibition KINETIC LULLABY (June 9–July 16, 2022), co-curated by Alison Causer and Darla Migan of Variable Terms at the NYSS DUMBO Gallery. Ross is currently archivist and associate producer for the film project Seeking Mavis Beacon where she sees “a great big love 4 those of us who are Black and Digital and Feminist” through an exploration of the legacy and erasure of Renée L'Espérance, the first person to model as Mavis Beacon.
Darla Migan, Ph.D. is a philosopher and art critic based in New York City. Migan completed her graduate training in philosophical aesthetics with a dissertation on the orientation of judgment and the philosopher-artist Adrian Margaret Smith Piper. In 2021 she founded the independent online course Philosophy for Artists and the curatorial venture Variable Terms. Migan is on the faculty of Parsons School of Design at The New School for Social Research, and is a 2021 grantee of The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in Short-Form Writing.
Olivia McKayla Ross, still from a video experiment (2019)
1 Sylvia Wynter, a hybrid course faciliated by manuel arturo abreu, presented by LAND in partnership with Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA), January 20–February 10, 2022. https://nomadicdivision.org/exhibition/sylvia-wynter-manuel-arturo-abreu/.
2 The American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), Fifth Edition defines various delusional disorder types.
3 CCRU: Writings 1997-2003 (timespiralpress.net, Time Spiral Press: 2015). https://files.libcom.org/files/%5BCcru,_Nick_Land%5D_Ccru_Writings_1997-2003(BookZZ.org).pdf.
June 28, 2022
BACK TO TOP
Internet as Archipelago
Olivia McKayla Ross interviewed by Darla Migan
Courtesy Olivia McKayla Ross
Caribbean-American programmer-poet Olivia McKayla Ross and I met over the internet and then talked on the phone for many hours before holding this IRL interview. We discussed her video practice and her coining of the term Cyberdoula, reaching into the concept of data trauma and thinking about the necessity of care work across transmission cultures. Through her mermaid nymph water mythos, Ross explores modalities of the wave as she applies slit scan techniques to create textures that express her feelings of navigating the Internet as a colonized archipelago.—Darla Migan
Darla Migan: You describe yourself as a video artist, programmer, and poet. I wonder if we can expand on how this has come about?
Olivia McKayla Ross: It happened quickly. I was a high schooler and then I was a working artist. As I graduated high school in 2019 I spent a lot of time in New York art community spaces like BUFU and the School for Poetic Computation.
DM: What is BUFU?
OMR: By Us For Us: a collective of Black and Asian friends and queer people, a documentary collective that's been working on a distributed, decentralized documentary project for the last couple of years. But they also do community engagement projects every summer. They started Cloud Nine during the pandemic, which was basically an online platform for people to find community, to keep each other safe, share resources, share mutual aid, but also to take classes and be in community. A lot of their work stems from their mission of pan-Black pan-Asian solidarity, and that's what their documentary is about. I helped a little bit with making their website.
DM: How did you get involved with BUFU?
OMR: I met them a few weeks before my graduation. On the day of my graduation I got on a plane to Minneapolis to be a student volunteer at a conference. While I was there, BUFU was presenting and I was assigned to their panel. I was super nosy, asking them, like, do they need any water? Is your mic setup right? etc. And then we ended up talking. They said, well, if you're based in New York, find us, we're doing this WYFY (With You For You) school in the summer. It was a decentralized summer school, taught by community members, about whatever they felt was necessary knowledge to share on a variety of different topics. I think someone taught a class about dumpster diving, and I taught a class about cyberfeminism.
DM: How did you design your course on cyberfeminism?
OMR: I was in the midst of piecing together what cyberfeminism meant to me. And I hadn’t read the Cyborg Manifesto. I'm actually reading it this week for a cybernetics book club that I'm doing with my friends. It’s going to be my first time reading it.
What we're doing is we have a text and we have a counter text, each time. This week we're reading the Cyborg Manifesto, but we're also reading Countersexual Manifesto by Paul Preciado, which includes his own take on the Cyborg Manifesto. Cyberfeminism came about when I was first crystallizing my thoughts and feelings about data, imperialism and the internet—what it meant to participate in all of it. That class is where I came up with the vocabulary of “data trauma,” because I was wondering how to teach this concept to someone.
Similarly, the concept of a cyber doula was something that I'd come up with for that class in order to communicate what was in my head. We read the Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century (1991) by VNS Matrix. We made our own digital avatars, our own cyberfeminist superheroes. In general we were sharing and talking around the idea of data trauma for the first time and what it can look like for different people.
Olivia McKayla Ross, THAT GIRL (2020). Video experiment. 00:15 minutes
DM: I know that you recently changed your handle, and then you changed it back. Why?
OMR: I changed my title to cyberdoula. Before the handle, my username was just my government name.
DM: When was that?
OMR: Summer of 2019. When I came up with the idea of a cyber doula, I envisioned it as a community role, to give vocabulary to a person who takes on a form of care work. It wasn't meant to be a stage name. Initially, I thought of it as a great way to make the idea enter the public discourse.
I think now I understand a little better that, despite what I wanted, the title is kind of synonymous with my Instagram presence itself. But my Twitter is a totally different user name and just my space to talk.
DM: I like that you’re saying title and not username. Do you want to share your Twitter handle?
OMR: It's mermaidwar. I really love the idea of myth, and creating myths. I like myth as a literary style, it's really fun and funky. There's a sense of wonder associated with myth when you read it. It’s something that I'm interested in, writing-wise, and as a texture for making video work as well.
DM: I’m interested in your not having read the Cyborg Manifesto as someone calling themselves a Cyber Doula, as a self identified Caribbean-American programmer poet in 2021. I wonder if you have a sense of generational difference in your reading life?
OMR: It's not like the Cyborg Manifesto is out of style… When I was trying to envision the kind of career I wanted for myself, I was looking to find the Black women who were writing about it. l had access to Mimi Ọnụọha’s work, Simone Browne, and Ruha Benjamin. I read the work of these women very early on. Cyborg Manifesto was on my list, but I still have so much to read. My introduction to critical theory was through Audre Lorde and Caribbean women writers of the ‘60s and ‘70s and later, like June Jordan, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Catherine McKittrick, and Sylvia Wynter, who I actually found through manuel abreu’s class.1 I also really like Kamau Braithwaite’s poetry. I was very interested in literary Caribbean cultural production. I feel that the Caribbean is a very useful place to start to think about concepts like Island making and marronage and how these apply to the internet and transmission culture. I'm thinking a lot about the internet as an archipelago and what that means. Specifically as a colonized archipelago, it’s really a big part of my work now. I’ve allowed myself to be guided by Caribbean philosophy when thinking about cybernetics.
Olivia McKayla Ross, Body Resolution. Mixed media
DM: This is so great because the art world loves to keep colonizing. What do you mean by transmission culture?
OMR: I was thinking about this phrase when it comes to art and technology. The thing that I've been most interested in is video and this idea of tele-vision in a pure sense: the transmission of visions to people across space and time. I think a lot about how the way we send information to each other has changed in this context of capitalism, starting not even from the dot-com boom, but radio and television itself, and how that changed society. I see a book behind you titled The Technical Delusion, which I read and reread, by Jeffrey Sconce. I think the subtitle is “Electronics, Power, Insanity.” They talk about how, with the introduction of television and radio to society, hundreds of thousands of people were calling their psychiatrists and saying things like, “My television has been projecting images into my brain while I sleep.” All of these technology-driven anxieties and DSM-V delusions2 and teenage girls who hear celebrities singing over the radio and think that they’re personal messages of love directed at them. I think about that time period and how it's kind of the same today. People still think that influencers and celebrities are in love with them. This is a more evidence-based claim nowadays, for example with people thinking that their electronics are actively listening to them. That's not such a ridiculous fear, even though it's pretty computationally expensive for someone to be actually listening to you. They don't need to do that to do the things that they're doing.
I just think that transmission culture is a useful way to talk about a specific phenomenon in society. I’m thinking of something a bit different than VNS Matrix, who originally coined the idea of a “data, industrial, imperial environment.” I want to be more specific when talking about the different ways that our society has shifted under electronics. This has also made me want to be more specific when I'm using the terms technology and electronics. Cultural historian Jeffrey Sconce talks about the politics of electricity. Technology, for me, is a very vague word. Which is often a good thing—it’s capacious. Conversation is a form of technology, right? It's just a way of doing, it's not necessarily electronic. We've had surveillance technologies for way longer than we’ve had electronics. As long as we've had watch towers and guard towers, we've had surveillance.
I spent some time at the School for Poetic Computation after the summer of BUFU. That was really the space where I came up with my first artist statement. It talked about trust and faith as aesthetics and materials, and about faith economies in the metaphoric landscape of cyberspace, how faith is used aesthetically. We asked which (web)pages feel legitimate and why. What is the graphic design of legitimacy and what informs that? I still think about it, but that’s not what my artist statement says anymore.
Olivia McKayla Ross, I HATE YOU SO MUCH (2020). Video experiment. 00:19 minutes
DM: I’d like to go back to the mermaidwar handle because I’m recalling my own experience of the mythos of the emergence of the Internet by way of military innovation.
OMR: Black Girl in the Pool is the title of something I’m currently writing. I'm thinking about water and cybernetics. Not just the physical material, but the cultural imagination around water, the aesthetic imagination of it as well, and how it can help us understand new ways of interacting with data. I was thinking about that with this idea of mermaids. I was really tickled by all of the meanings of the word wave—electronic waves, waves in the ocean, but also waving at a friend—and how all of those waves are actually still the same word.
It's not like meanings shift, it's just that context has shifted. I was thinking about the oceanic will—Jackie Wang wrote an essay titled “Oceanic Feeling and Communist Affect.” I just learned what affect means, and I also just learned what semiotic means. Maybe oceanic feeling might help if we understand it in the sense of oneness and depth, of being part of something larger. I was just thinking about being a little mermaid nymph on the telephone line, and the sense of water as both a metaphor and the physical reality of the internet in terms of the transatlantic submerged cables.
DM: Can one go on Google Maps and look up the actual lines?
OMR: Yes. A lot of them are also above water on land, across islands. In the Philippines I know of one place where you can see them.
DM: That's so interesting, given various colonial histories as well as the sort of “original" settler colonialism, and the transatlantic slave trade.
OMR: Yeah, and also in terms of island nations, Africa, South America, and places in Asia that are the world's dumping grounds for electronic waste.
DM: This seems so far away from how I came to be introduced to something called post-internet art.
OMR: I don’t know what that is. It seems very submerged in this aesthetic that I don't have any nostalgia for because I wasn't there. But I understand that it's Y2K.
DM: It’s bumping around the year 2000. That I would agree with.
OMR: And post-internet, I guess, is post- the beginning of the internet?
DM: It's supposed to be the after, rather—something that we’ve been within since then.
OMR: I think we should stop adding post to things. History is over. Also, the future is kind of over...
DM: Let's just slow that down. What do you mean by this?
OMR: I'm not the first to say it. People don't talk about current events as history anymore. Even when I think about art history, we started calling things modern a while ago, and now it's not modern anymore. So now we have a new word, contemporary. With cyberfeminism, a lot of the key texts are written by people who are anticipating the future, accelerationist readings like CCRU writings,3 like McKenzie Wark’s Hacker Manifesto, Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?, even though there are people writing about these ideas now. It’s interesting reading the arguments that feminists had with each other and how they disagreed. Things are messy and complicated. I feel like cyberfeminists don't argue with each other enough. I think a lot of it is because of capitalism: disagreeing is bad for clout, being a voice of dissent is bad for business. People who I feel are very radical thinkers still have bills to pay. When you have this livelihood of being a working artist you still need to be supported by institutions. We have not yet built community infrastructure to support artists like that. We're not Canada, Australia, or the UK, who have government funding for the arts (which are also in danger of being defunded every single year). We have to do things like make a Patreon or teach at a university, which can support you as much as they can silence you. Or you must have your work shown in a museum that has a very bloody colonial history and which is often directly related to the histories of your ancestors, the stolen belongings of your great great-ancestors.
DM: How did it feel to make My Teen Bedroom for your show at Transfer Gallery in Brooklyn (April 2022)?
OMR: I liked that title because it’s ironic, which I feel requires you to take something very seriously.
Olivia McKayla Ross, still from MY TEEN BEDROOM (2021). Video, sound. 03:19 minutes ⇾ watch here
DM: I want to talk about this piece because it was a kind of debut moment for sharing your art. Could you talk about moving out of your family home during the pandemic and the anticipation of doing so?
OMR: I really like the technique of slit-scan. Originally it was a technique in experimental film. One of my mentors, Golan Levan, published a blog post of the history of the technique. I really like it as a different way of photographing movement. You have one slit that the camera looks through and then computationally takes the pixel from a certain segment of the camera, creating a drippy continuum of time and space, playing with pixels as its own kind of material. I wanted to use it in the video to communicate how time and space felt during the pandemic. I was thinking about ‘mad time’ from La Marr Jurelle Bruce’s “Interludes in Madtime: Black Music, Madness, and Metaphysical Syncopation,” and Kamau Braithwaithe’s teleological idea of Tidalectics. I was thinking about the invention of the timeline and in the process of making this video I was thinking about what it was like to be in my room and how best to capture that feeling. A symptom of depression is blurriness and I was thinking about how to communicate that.
I felt that contrasted with the ways I felt working on an experimental documentary project with my friend Jasmine. My bedroom now felt like I was contained by versus living in a place. It was not claustrophobia but a sensation that arises when you’ve been in the same space for a long time. I wanted to explore the contours and edges of that space and what I was doing there. The techniques I used in that video was one of the first times I was able to translate the more theoretical ideas I’ve been having into textures that can be seen and felt.
Olivia McKayla Ross, WE WERE SOMETHING DON'T YOU THINK SO (2020). Video experiment. 00:58 minutes
OMR (cont.): The line between craft and commodity is very blurred. I don't want to conflate art with cyberfeminism. There are things that are in the cyberfeminist field that are not art. Just like the post-internet aesthetic that we're talking about is an art aesthetic, but it's also very popular in fashion, which makes me feel that it's more of a signifier of cultural nostalgia than it is related to the work that's being done. I want to see actual post-internet art, where the post is actually looking towards a future and not reviewing what has happened. I think maybe that's not the prefix I should use, because I learned recently that, for example, postcolonial is an analysis of stuff that's happened. It would be really interesting to see internet art that is post-something else than the internet.
Why is the future dead? I don't know. I can't give a good answer for that. I’m just really comfortable saying it, as a young person. But I also feel like I live and was raised in the time that everybody was dreaming about. And now it's here. I don't think my generation isn't dreaming about the future. At the same time, it looks like literal fire and apocalypse.
DM: Looks like that to me, too. We're 20 years apart, I think.
OMR: I think so, if you're around the same age as my eldest sister.
DM: I'm so excited to talk to you because it doesn't feel like there's 20 years between us. Given the kind of analysis that I've been doing in my own study, I actually feel we’re sympatico in ways that many people in my generation aren’t. We had a conversation a while ago, where I said I felt a realistic outlook from you, versus a young one.
OMR: I haven't been making work for that long. Most of my research and art practice began when the pandemic began. I was making work at the School for Poetic Computation in the fall of 2019, and in the winter of 2020 I was trying to figure out what my next move was. I was in limbo, beginning my own personal research, a transitional phase.
And then early 2020 was the beginning of the pandemic. It’s been time spent inside, reading lots of books and, well, also coexisting with a lot of grief, pain, and trauma due to the pandemic and also with Black Lives Matter—it's weird to even call it a resurgence, because I remember when BLM happened when I was in middle school, and I remember how it felt. This felt the same, though I was now older and could control the way I interfaced with it in a way that I could not when I was younger, because I didn't yet have the computer literacy. And the world at large didn't have computer literacy yet, figuring out how to participate in this hashtag and not traumatize Black children with unrestricted access to the internet.
The day Trayvon Martin died was the day I got my period for the first time. There was so much that I understood perfectly as well. Seeing that happen again and people being so much wiser about posting TWs. When I was in boarding school and Trump won the election, I had people to process that with. But at home during the pandemic, we didn’t have that conversation and I don’t think a lot of Black families do. Ranting in anger with my brother, we had those kinds of conversations, which is a form of processing but not of care. In reality the days went by very slowly and very quickly.
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Olivia McKayla Ross, still from a video experiment (2019)
Olivia McKayla Ross’ video iteration of her text LAKE OF STARS is featured in the exhibition KINETIC LULLABY (June 9–July 16, 2022), co-curated by Alison Causer and Darla Migan of Variable Terms at the NYSS DUMBO Gallery. Ross is currently archivist and associate producer for the film project Seeking Mavis Beacon where she sees “a great big love 4 those of us who are Black and Digital and Feminist” through an exploration of the legacy and erasure of Renée L'Espérance, the first person to model as Mavis Beacon.
Darla Migan, Ph.D. is a philosopher and art critic based in New York City. Migan completed her graduate training in philosophical aesthetics with a dissertation on the orientation of judgment and the philosopher-artist Adrian Margaret Smith Piper. In 2021 she founded the independent online course Philosophy for Artists and the curatorial venture Variable Terms. Migan is on the faculty of Parsons School of Design at The New School for Social Research, and is a 2021 grantee of The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in Short-Form Writing.
1 Sylvia Wynter, a hybrid course faciliated by manuel arturo abreu, presented by LAND in partnership with Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA), January 20–February 10, 2022. https://nomadicdivision.org/exhibition/sylvia-wynter-manuel-arturo-abreu/.
2 The American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), Fifth Edition defines various delusional disorder types.
3 CCRU: Writings 1997-2003 (timespiralpress.net, Time Spiral Press: 2015). https://files.libcom.org/files/%5BCcru,_Nick_Land%5D_Ccru_Writings_1997-2003(BookZZ.org).pdf.
June 28, 2022
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