16 min readApr 17, 2022

American Artist: Black Gooey Universe at LABOR

Object Analysis: Mother of All Demos II

Alejandro Perea

Aided: by Helen Klnaris

April 15, 2022

“Racial Slavery — which generated Blackness as a site of permanent extraction, gratuitous physical violence, and social death — provided the material and ideological basis for the United States.” Artist, American. Black Gooey Universe.

Photo Credit Ramiro Chavez.

The following concerns: instruction and direction of the visual field, social and cultural fabrics, critical race theory, technology, and the artist, American Artist. In a research-based study of the Mother of All Demos II, the artist’s implementation of the drama of criticism interjects the material and popular cultural references and suggests the “affective” statement. The conduct of the study of Visual Culture in a critical manner follows a stack of points that painlessly guide the reader through the questions’ stakes. Namely, patterns in technology embedded as conscripted roles of human/machine interaction, ontologically speaking, is a self-similar pattern to the conscripted human roles of master and slave. Culturally this produces the instruction and acceptance of race-based slavery in the visual and cultural fields and the view of the public mind. These stakes deliver on the visual system of signals in the interstices of that pile. This way, the anticipation of the reader intends to be provoked. The contextualization, later reintroduced as visual analysis in the following stack, is the crux of this visual assessment of compositional elements. Understood here as a working social context, the goal is to guide, to give a sighted awareness of the optical components, and the heightened historical context in the body of this text. Transfers and transitions into the analysis of coded material and iconographic significance lead the study into the criticism and this intervention into the discourse of the intersection of race, technology, and critical artistic intervention. The last part of the criticism works to unpack the meanings of the bodies at stake or “at the stake”.

In conclusion, indigenous voices seek to trouble the technology sector discourse and their relationship to the bodies at the bottom of the supply chain and the “affected.” The use of the word “affect” is intentional. Consider the limitations of onlookers, meaning the consumers of the tech products, the bodies mined for data, and their connection to the bodies mining for metal to create the technology.

American Artist and Mother of All Demos II.

American Artist, a California-born artist who lives and works in New York, legally changed their name to American Artist in 2013. Artist creates thought experiments that mine the history of technology, race, and knowledge production. American has earned many accolades at thirty-three years of age, including receiving the recent 2021 LACMA Art & Tech Lab Grant and attending the prestigious Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. American Artist’s art takes the form of sculpture, software, and video that amend viewers understanding of the colonial and racial beginnings of technology. Focused on making artwork that grapples with the black experience and technology, Artist’s first solo exhibition at Labor Gallery in Mexico City has several artworks that reinforce anti-colonial discourse surrounding race and technology. Situated against a white wall at Mexico City’s LABOR Gallery, on a white desktop, is a carefully modeled vintage Apple computer cast with dirt. Mother of All Demos II (2021) is modeled after the 1977 Apple II and stands as a critique of the technology sector. The title comes from the original demonstration of the graphic user interface (GUI), or shortened preferred by Artist, “gooey.”

Stanford Research Institute (SRI, 1946) created Silicon Valley “creativity” by making a space for engineers free of economic pressures they might face in a standard corporate context — a place for straight cis white men in business ties to sit on bean bag chairs and embrace consequential ideas without fear of retribution. This model has been repeated at XeroxPARC (Xerox Palo Alto Research Center), Apple, Ideo, Google and Facebook exemplify the liberal impetus of Silicon Valley. The first iterations of a graphical user interface(GUI) — a clickable interface, cursor, and remedial computemouse — were demoed at SRI’s Augmented IntellecResearch Center in 1968. This demo, known colloquially athe “mother of all demos,” served as the harbinger of high-techInnovation. -From the essay Black Gooey Universe by American Artist.

The Mother of all Demos was the first demonstration of a Graphic User Interface. Part of tech human history presented to the world by a young Doug Engelbart took place on December 9 1968 in San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium. Since known in the industry as the Mother of all Demos, Engelbart invented the demonstration of a Graphic User Interface with a mouse at the Stanford Research Institute, which he also founded. This paper deals with another history, one goes deeper into the trans-Atlantic slave trade and race-based colonization of the last hundred years. It is still going on today, just in different forms; as we will see later in this paper, elaborate distancing measures keep eyes away from the mines and sights on the tech sector’s polished finish fetish brands. Consumer tech giants like Google, Amazon, Apple, and Telsa rarely discuss the potential downsides of their work. Lakes of acid from these mines result from the production of metals like silver, silicon, cobalt, and lithium. Places we have never heard of and that are not well-known hide mines. Insalubrious lakes of acid are the bi-products of these mining operations for metals like silver, tin, silicon, cobalt, and lithium. A gap or omission of these miners in the discourse, perfectly represented by the handprints, signal the trace of a body notwithstanding.

Mother of All Demos II operates on several visual registers. A sculpture installation comprises a white tabletop with black sawhorse legs, an earthen computer with a keyboard, and two floppy disk drives connected by a rainbow data cable, which both appear as petrified technological artifacts. Atop the dirt, on the Apple computer sits a black CRT monitor, but soaked into the computer and pooled below the underboard is a shiny dark blood-like substance. Two handprints made of the same black gooey liquid on either side of the computer complete the piece. Visually, Black Gooey Universe makes strong points that push against common understanding surrounding the early beginnings of technology. On the website Collectors.com, detailed photo documentation provides a close-up shot of Mother of All Demos II, showing the sticky black gooey substance dripping off the edge of the desk. Each element of Mother of All Demos II, the dirt formed into a retro computer, the CRT monitor, and the handprints left from the black gooey substance pooled under and dripping off the desktop, has a historically significant and broadened understanding of the work’s visual conveyance.

Said in an interview Artist gave to collectors.com, the colors selected for MOAD2 have special historical significance to both technology and anti-racist and anti-colonial discourses. The Apple II was the first computer with a white graphic user interface, and this finish-fetish aesthetic continues to be the standard in computer design. By making the computer out of dirt, Artist signals the viewer’s attention to the raw materials needed by the technology sector for electronic components.

The black CRT monitor and the black gooey substance again reinforce the visual signal to the viewer of the importance of holding and maintaining the knowledge that technology is a product of colonization and racism. To further emphasize the relationship between raw minerals, technology, racial color codes, and colonization Artist has likewise selected another visual element rife with such historical underpinnings, Coca-Cola. The viewer can infer from the single-channel video “Do not boil your iPhone in Coca-cola” that the blood-like handprints and puddle are Coca-Cola boiled into a thick ooze.

Today’s technology is ubiquitous, and the data economy’s premise is on computational maximalism. Maintaining ignorance about the violence of extractive operations that supply the tech sector with rare earth metals bolsters the industry practice of elaborate distancing measures. In Kate Crawford’s book The Atlas of AI, these measures and the many connections technology has to race and colonization are unpacked in greater detail. Rather than distancing the technology industry’s image from its past of benefiting from a foundation of forced extraction of human labor with slavery and colonization, Artist presents the viewer with evidence that a body is no longer visible, save the two imprints of their hands. Contested here is the meaning of those bodies, the fresh handprints laden with evidence of held knowledge. Honing in on claims made Crawford that the tech world opens the body to feel in more ways than the visible, “the affectivity” of the piece makes the discourse more feelable. The sand castle-like quality of the computer is modeled to an acceptable degree of detail. The sticky pool of gooey black blood makes the viewers sense the mess that would be their hands, everywhere they touch, the black substance leaves an indelible mark.

Discourse: Historical Context of Art, Technology, and Race

Kate Crawford is a leading scholar of the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. Crawford’s 2021 insiders critique of the tech sector, Atlas of AI, claims fiber optic cables lay on top of the first telegraph lines connecting British colonies [p39]. Currently, extended Artificial Intelligence is driving ecological extraction. Begin with the prehistories of the planet and follow the timeline to the dawn of the global information society, relations between technology, material environments, and labor practices are interdependent. Our largest-scale AI systems drive environmental, data, and human extraction in various forms. From the Victorian era onward, computation emerged as a desire to manage the war, population, and climate change.[Crawford 39] The routes of submarine cables today still map out the early colonies. Currently, our largest-scale AI systems belie dark ironies driving forms of environmental, data, and human extraction. Behind fortifications of server yards and black box technologies, tech sector hides the hungry new life form, AIs.

Historical evidence supports the analysis of the artwork’s claims that technology has racial and colonial underpinnings. The power of visuality disperses itself by capturing the human visual field; this is the present possible through art and technology. American Artist demonstrates historically aware human authenticity, validated through artwork, and authenticated in the racial and colonial underpinnings of early technology. The rare earth metals needed for technological advance serves to underwrite the early stages of technology achievable through colonialism and race-based slavery. Racist formations of early technologies, still present as emancipatory opportunities, ultimately support its evaluation. Mother of All DemosII holds knowledge and helps other bodies hold knowledge of today’s still colonially aligned technological systems. The opposite of dignity is violence, and MOAD2 is the site of bloody violence. The handprints are indistinguishable, only that they are humans hands. They impose white neutrality through the technological devices — the black gooey substance pools under the keyboard. Artist states in the interview on collectures.com about technology, “It’s values are a holdover from manifest destiny and the colonial motivations of the untied states settlers.” From the press release: “ponder the ideological assertion of whiteness as neutral and the finish-fetish aesthetic of today’s computers.” This work is essential because of the rapid advance of technology and artificial intelligence, and cultural critiques of the tech sector rarely take such a poignant visual approach as does Mother of All Demos II. How to care about something, writing, art, an artist, a discourse, caring is when what is made more feelable by art changes the future.

This pattern in technology is embedded in the conscripted roles of human/machine interaction, ontologically speaking, this is a self-similar pattern to the conscripted human roles of master and slave.

[Master Slave Flip-flop]

Culturally this produces the instruction and acceptance of race-based slavery in the visual and cultural fields and in the view of the public mind. American Artist sheds light on the past, where technology was a product of and accelerator to colonization. Anti-racism critical race theory, community movements, and the organization Black Lives Matter, all depend on technology for the strength to connect activists. The current state of material raw earth extraction and the bodies that pay the price with their bodies troubles the technologically centered solutionism of the anti-colonial anti-police brutality efforts; An uncomfortable truth becasue these movements are driven and propagated through technology. This discourse on network technology, its origins in colonization and slavery, and tech sector dependence on the extraction of raw materials today, troubles connections between anti-racist movements like Black Lives Matter and the networks they depend on to strengthen their cause. A computer can be a knowledge-holding object but is rife with the potential to change, alter, or obliterate past knowledge. Annihilation happens through the decay of formats and by elaborate distancing measures. Ignorance of this environmental impact is a point of dependence on technology. The technology sector industry is careful to maintain the consumer ignorance surrounding the violent impact the demand for raw material creates in the lives of bodies historically exploited by colonialism. The artwork makes strong points against a common understanding of technology’s early beginnings. Artwork like this will push technologists to work toward decisions of mutual benefit. Suffice as a message, a history lesson, a point of contention, an affirmation of the discourse of race and technology, Mother of All demos gives a visual suggestion that this desktop is a site of violence. The handprints of the artist or the user demonstrate a trace of that violence.

Changes in the technology timeline shifted to white neutrality and commenced the distancing measures and ignorance of technology’s environmental and human costs. Collectuers.com provides photo documentation of the show, Black gooey universe. A close-up of Mother of all Demos shows the gooey substance’s sticky, drippy, and bubbly quality. American Artist shares his writings about technology on his website. Arguably what Artist is doing with this installation is disrupting the seductiveness of technology. Rather than the finished fetish aesthetic viewers are expecting, conditioned to expect, Artist has left a mess and a message. The message is a mess. In conclusion, artists like Artist act visually; Artist directs their performative aesthetics and social history discourse to direct and instruct the intervention.

Conclusion

Mother of All DemosII comprises a white tabletop on which a computer made of dirt sits. Before the production of the AppleII, the model discussed here, Apple made the Lisa. The Lisa GUI displays a white screen. The black CRT monitor in MOAD2 demarcates a racial code in the decision by Apple designers that demanded more power for the overall unit and decided a direction for the white neutral aesthetic Apple is known for today. On the dirt computer and spilled under it is a puddle of black gooey substance. On both sides of the wet sticky puddle two anonymous handprints, fresh, not smeared, are left with intention, like a stamp of the thumbprint. What if the technetium comes back as a hungry animal. If cooperation can be a person, then semi-sentient networks that exist in machines hunger and thirst like any animal on this planet. Formed, held in, by, and between bodies, this way of seeing significant kinship of earthen origin forms relativity and knowledge. Miners haul tons of rock at a cost to their bodies and local environment, and technology users mined for data feed the hunger that will demand evermore. As such, technology reaches one of two points. It realizes itself as a knowledge holder of the planet earth and a steward of life here on this planet. Perhaps a case of techno-optimism, but this step has all but assuredly happened. Visualize the total metal in all of your smart devices, now value your life inasmuch by owning the moral weight of that metal. Now visualize your body, tied by a rope and entering a narrow opening in the earth, descending thousands of feet into the burning earth for your devices. The second point is that a technological change will make all knowledge unusable in a future with new, few, or no rules. That has not happened and we are moving to a better planet for life.

Afterword, Notes and Works Cited

In this context, a movement of historical reference uses this as a metaphor for how individual tasks cannot function without the collective. This material makes this conceptual collection confront the limitations of the onlooker. They are gathering information and reading sources about Artificial Intelligence and the costs to human bodies and environments with plants and animals. This artwork, Mother of All DemosII, delves deep into the discourse of technology and race. They were brought together by American Artist in a sculptural art installation and using the vehicles of material and texture, race, and the beginnings of technology to trouble the limitations of onlookers’ white neutrality. This paper explores the limitations of the spectator. Affective knowledge, contained in bodies, absent but not missing, present in handprints of a black gooey substance. Mother of All Demos II presents vehicles of material and texture to the bodies missing in discourse, it’s not afraid to do work that does not mesh with contemporary mindsets. Emancipatory opportunities, an aberration from truth through Mother of All Demos concatenation of actualisms, result in the transfer of affective knowledge through bodies across landscapes and regions of time. Moreover, the missing knowledge embodied emotion or sensitivity changes the meanings of bodies in producing technologies, which means sharing knowledge and maintaining the discourse today. Ongoing forward, a sensitivity to or intuitive understanding of mutuality and mutuality and interdependence,

relationally mutual interdependence between all bodies. The origin of all technology is the human body and the knowledge held within the body. The paper’s goal is to span an affective bridge across physical time and space to the bodies of those missing from current technology sector discourses — and other missing voices! The MIT Conference on Indigeouness voices speaking towards the colonization of Mars. Elaborate distancing measures, but visual seduction through advanced technologies, revelations of things multiple generations of tech build on one another. Today, the bodies share this at the beginning of the raw material supply chain. Conclusion: The season is now, in The purist sense, humane. These are the missing bodies in the discourse, the handprints on MOAD2 this study into holding space for the missing bodies.

The conscripted roles of human-machine interaction bearing the burden of the tech sector follow the guides that lead to decisions of mutual benefit. The pattern develops in a system where the meaning of bodies is absent from the legitimizing language. Whereas, the meaning of bodies is caring and humane, and narrow enough to include more-than-human bodies such as plants and animals in models of growth vis-à-vis Harroway’s cyborg Manifesto. The discourse on the past of tech and race is not settled and done. The augmentation of our collective intelligence to work is one of humanity’s most important problems. These interventions into the discourse require ongoing maintenance and are often actively neutralized by tech sector public relations firms. The benefit of expanding the age market is the effect on the elaborate distancing efforts of classified tech programs. It starts with having a human body.

Its starts with the meaning of having a human body than seeing what keeps us from fully realizing that meaning. “ The message behind colonialism and racism is that our bodies have different meanings to ourselves and much more to each other. The concept of the body means something different to the technology sector than does the body of a human at the earthen origin of the rock and life-bearing rock.

On Life Bearing rock.

Works Cited:

Atlas of Artificial Intelligence. Kate Crawford. Yale U, Press (New Haven). 2021.

Artists: Rethinking the Blockchain. Ed. Ruth Catlow, Nathan Jones, Sam Skinner. Torque Editions and Furtherfield (UK). 2017.

Nothing More American: In Conversation with American Artist Interview by Evrim Oralkan and Eser Coban. https://www.collecteurs.com/interview/nothing-more-american-in- conversation-with-American-artist.

Images of the Artworks of Black Gooey Universe at LABOR Gallery Mexico City.

“No State,” several broken and cracked iPhones are several untidy stacks on the floor in the corner. 2021.

“Untitled (too thick) Gold,” 2012

and

“Untitled (too thick) II, “2021

A tall, nearly leaning stack of Brocken and cracked iPhones, at the top of the stack balanced un-surreptitiously at the top of the tower is a shiny black carcinogenic mass.

“Master-slave flip flop” is a new wall piece made of neon formed to resemble a computational diagram. In the diagram, one master computational system has total circuit control; the other systems are the slave system. 2021.