Working Title: Digital Art Curriculum – hiba ali

Being intuitively inspired to be a healer through images and songs was my call to be an artist. bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress and Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope helped me understand those frameworks better. I think about how knowledge can be shared as a way to create horizontal formations of power across territory, time and space that are shared by all. Writing on Mariame Kaba’s “hope is a discipline” and Aradhati Roy’s “pandemic is a portal” were life-lines at the dawn of the pandemic and continue to sustain me. For me, knowledge sharing is an inherent act of care. Standalone workshops and workshop series are part of intentional spaces of care and connection that are fostered within a praxis of non-hierarchical learning, open-source tools and community-oriented troubleshooting where thinking through ideas and problem solving is a communal effort shared by all. The workshop space centers accessibility and multi-modal learning where imagination is encouraged through slow sips of learning. Collective education spaces like Cassandra, LA Warman, Compton Girls Club, InterAccess, Factory Media Art Centre, Charles Street Video, Digital Art Resource Center, Ed Video, homeschoolpdx, Video Pool Media Art Centre, and LIFT are doing amazing work. The following four summations are ongoing experiments in learning and thinking through digital technologies, they aid in life’s journey of ongoing transformation.

Technology as a trainer

Whatever we do with technology is designed with colonial, eurocentric, and extractive approaches as its foundation. It trains us to internalize this logic – take, exploit and forget. Interrupt this extractive “default” by asking questions regarding how “new” technology is deployed, where is it coming from, who does it benefit, who is it for, and who benefits from it. It is also about thinking about the materiality and alive-ness of these ancient minerals in our technologies — we can ask, what is this being’s presence, what ancient alloys came together for this being’s creation, what is this being’s spirit, how is it constructed, is it a for-profit venture, designed to be a military-war minion? Moreover, does this being’s presence offer communal ways of connecting? This being is alive like you and me. (See: Ingrid Burrington’s A Rare and Toxic Age; Wendy Chun’s Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, and Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition).

Technology as healing

What does it mean to use technologies as a modality of healing? How do we cultivate community through networks when their default is to harness and profit off of our data? Is it about making digital community spaces around an idea or learning something different and pooling collective knowledge? Cyberdoula’s term “data trauma” of the ways information’s over-accessibility can create forms of digital trauma and disregards personhood is instructive in this. Building off Tabitha Rezaire’s Deep Down Tidal (2017), Neema Githere’s research on the notion of data healing provides a framework in which data can be used as forms of connectivity as collectivity. (See: Alice Yuan Zhang’s Becoming Infrastructure for ways to think through collective grief towards love and care, and Virtual Care Lab for the ways portals are sites of connectivity and collective healing, instrumental work through the ongoing pandemic).

Technology as accessibility: There are many different ways to learn and share art. There are many art worlds. If you can’t find your space, then make it. Write yourself into the story (Octavia Butler.)

I ask myself these questions when I start exploring new technologies, where does it come from? Where does “it” go? The “it” can be data, frameworks, supply chains and approaches (See: Kate Crawford’s Atlas of AI; Consentful Tech by Tawana Petty; Una Lee; Stop LAPD Spying Coalition; and Data4BlackLives).

Is it accessible? How is this work meant to be circulated (which communities & how will it be shared)?

Is it archival? How does this work want to be remembered (does it?)?

What is unresolved? What conversation does this work start?

What do I have access to? Are the “tools” of this work accessible later? Shareable?

Is it connected to your community(es)? What are ways the community is being cultivated through this action? Who are we in conversation with?

What forms of cultural knowledge am I centering? Which ways of being need to be decentered? (See Mariame Kaba & Andrea Ritchie, No More Police: A Case for Abolition (2022), Ruha Benjamin’s Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (2022), Detroit Community Technology Project).

Technology as ancestral framework: weaving, coding and braiding

Technology is an ancestral practice passed down, working with both the physical and digital realm. Weaving, sewing and making music are all practices that connect us to the corporality of our bodies and materiality of our environment.

For me, the term “African-Asian futurism” is applicable to my interest in technologies and connecting past to present. African-Asian futurism is oriented with the past, in order to go into the future, we must go into the past. That’s why the spiral is, as Beheroze Shroff mentioned in an artist talk we did at Modern Fuel, a Cho Ku Rei reiki symbol of meditation to channel energy and bring more energy flow as well as an ontological symbol, a symbol of knowledge, to trace the past, we go to the future.¹ Technology doesn’t have to be associated with electricity, it can be a technique, an act, a word, gesture, symbol and activity. It is part of continuing to connect with practices of care and connection around us. Technologies of African-Asian futurism connect us through embodied technologies such as dancing, weaving, singing, and coding to the present. I am not the sole author of things I make as an artist, I am making in community with kin: friends, spirits, family and guides. These practices are ancient and contemporary simultaneous with the Swahili-Indian Ocean. I think of this as part of the 3D animation, coding, performance, music and video artwork I do. Art that calls and brings us toward home and healing, closer to our bodies, kin and helps us belong to ourselves.

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Feature image: hiba ali, THE PLEASURE OF PLAY THAT BRINGS US TOGETHER, 2021-ongoing. Image: courtesy of artist.

Image description: A 3D cube covered in pink abstract lines floats on a purple and blue background. The cube is rounded at its edges as if it is made of a draped fabric. 

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hiba ali is a producer of moving images, sounds, garments and words. they reside in many time zones: chicago, toronto and eugene. born in karachi, pakistan, they belong to east african, south asian and arab diasporas. they are a practitioner and (re)learner of swahili, urdu, arabic and spanish languages. they work on two long term art and publication projects: the first being an art-based phd project that examines womyn of colour’s labour, and architecture of surveillance as it exists within the monopoly of amazon (corp.) and the second being a series of works that addresses music, cloth and ritual practices that connect east africa, south asia and the arabian peninsula in the swahili-indian ocean region. [www.hibaali.info]

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1. Quantum Healing. List Of All Reiki Symbols, Meanings & How To Use Their Power. QHHT Official. 2022.