Part object and part performance, Chrissy Brimmage’s Untitled (Pulse) utilizes 3D printing and live heartbeat data to overtly challenge the notion of tech neutrality. Presenting as a skeletonized human heart, the frame houses a pulsing luminous core that throws shadows of varying intensity across space. The light bulb’s fluctuations, though seemingly random, are a visual manifestation of the artist’s actual pulse, captured and translated in real-time from a networked sensor connected to the artist’s body for the duration of the exhibition. Although the triggers behind the fluctuations captured by the sensor will remain unknown to the audience, the sensor allows Untitled (Pulse) to exist as an embodied entity: a subjective data performance powered by an intimate abstraction of the artist’s physical and emotional state to make obvious the human behind the tech, running in parallel with a physical object made by contemporary technologies with lineages to resource extraction and human exploitation – such as the sensor’s own lithium battery, a technology that promises sustainable energy at the cost of the environmental, health, and human toll inflicted on miners in the Congo. These abstractions attempt to underscore the ever-present human element and impact intrinsically linked to technology, inviting reflection on the prevailing assumption of tech objectivity, the consequences of obscuring humanity from tech, and who slips through the cracks when we uncritically accept technology to be a neutral actor.

About Black Code Black Code highlights Black contemporary artists making use of emergent technologies in their practice. The three artists on view complicate the assumed neutrality of digital technologies, reimagining machines into frameworks that function to assert and extend black subjectivity. The title of the exhibition is drawn from the 2017 special issue of The Black Scholar where cultural theorists, Mark Anthony Neal and Jessica Marie Johnson describe Black Code Studies as queer, femme, fugitive, and radical; as a praxis and methodology that refuses the notion that black people are not engaged with technology, modernity, or the future. In offering an exploration of Black creative engagement with technology, this exhibition demonstrates the potentiality of new media to construct an expansive vision of Blackness; one that resists the rigidity of hegemonic representations, and instead, leans into the formal capacity of abstraction, multiplicity and rupture to visualize Black contemporary life.