This article examines American Artist’s installation “Sandy Speaks,” a chatbot inspired by Sandra Bland’s media activism, as an analytical connective point to pathways of Black technological critique and histories of Black digitality and care. First connecting the work to its predigital antecedent The Negro Green Book, the article then argues that the typical aspirations of chatbot to approximate the human is disavowed in “Sandy Speaks,” enacting a Black technological critique of the human itself. Moreover, departing from celebratory discourses of Black technological innovation, the chatbot's low AI instantiates what the author calls a politics of technological refusal—a praxis of deliberate technological limitation as critique. This article asks what might happen when we seek potentialities of Black praxis in the slow, broken, old, technological forms, not as remedy, but as theory, critique, and an undoing of the recuperation of technological innovation as most legible mode of recognition.
This article examines the role of the visual in instances of recorded anti-Black racial violence and pushes against dominant discourses of the technological rescue narrative—that technology and more visibility will lead to different outcomes of accountability, protection, and safety. Instead, this article argues that the tightly bound association of anti-Black racial violence's recognizability to the visual has created a dynamic that simultaneously moves us closer to and further away from its ontological truths. Examining Twitter as a multisensorial platform and its users’ imaginative engagements with the #IfIDieInPoliceCustody hashtag memorializing Sandra Bland's death, the author identifies that users craft an anticipatory nonspectatorship, a mode of imaginative witnessing arising from the contexts of technological and visual failure and the situated imaginations of Black epistemologies. These users register a deep suspicion of the evidentiary and refuse the spectacular of racial violence's visual form, instead highlighting its ubiquitous and quotidian nature by asserting themselves into their own scenes of visual failure and becoming witnesses to their own imagined deaths. Finally, in identifying the visual failures surrounding Sandra Bland's jail cell, the author illuminates how the ontology of the glitch can demonstrate the mechanics of white supremacy's operations.
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