Episode Two explores the benefits and disadvantages of going unseen by surveillance technologies. We examine notions of visibility and invisibility in the context of AI imaging systems with author and professor Simone Browne, artist Sondra Perry, and artist and academic Mimi Onuoha.

WHEREAS divers Persons are holden in Slavery within divers of His Majesty’s Colonies, and it is just and expedient that all such Persons should be manumitted and set free, and that a reasonable Compensation should be made to the Persons hitherto entitled to the Services of such Slaves for the Loss which they will incur by being deprived of their Right to such Services. – An Act for the Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Colonies; for promoting the Industry of the manumitted Slaves; and for compensating the Persons hitherto entitled to the Services of such Slaves, 1833. 3 & 4 Will. ...

13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution Passed by Congress January 31, 1865. Ratified December 6, 1865. Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

“The definition of an ominous optimist is someone that goes through bad days in his life but is still optimistic for the future” says Mat Randol in “Ominous optimist ft. the solar system.” Such an affirmation synthesizes well the tone of this conversation with Mawena Yehouessi & Steffi Njoh Monny, respectively founder and editor-in-chief of the online platform Black(s) to the Future. In it, we discuss about the political role of science fiction and speculative visions for the African diaspora through humor and (terrestrial and extraterrestrial) gravity. Steffi Njoh Monny, as in Steffi Graf—same name, same date of birth, only twenty years earlier… ...

If you’ve been listening to this podcast these past eight years, you know that we always do our interviews “in house,” as we value the moment of the recorded conversation as well as the encounter with someone’s work and personality. Rules are made to have exceptions however, and today we are happy to introduce you to a conversation between Amélie Tresfels and Michaëla Danjé around the book that Michaëla recently edited,  entitled AfroTrans. This book is the very first one published by Cases Rebelles‘ newly created publishing house. With this new endeavor, the panafrorevolutionary collective co-founded by Michaëla, continues to ...

ARTISTS SPACE Center for Experimental Lectures: Amalle Dublon and Aria Dean February 2, 2020, 6pm Amalle Dublon and Aria Dean present new work for the Center for Experimental Lectures, an artist’s project based in New York that engages with the public lecture as form. Amalle Dublon will play and discuss Mariah Carey’s song “Honey,” relating it to concerns of dependency, growth and decay, and culinary sound. In Aria Dean’s lecture, To the Ringdown, two become one, bound by a third. As a part of a series of lectures co-commissioned by Montez Press Radio, their lectures will be broadcast live from Artists Space and ...

On this week’s show we sit down with the one and only American Artist, whose brilliant practice places a critical lens on technology and systems, often as a means by which to discuss the forms of systemic racism, control, and manipulation that become coded into the world. In our chat we’ll hear about _____________’s origins as an artist and graphic designer, and how their work extends across research and education. Tune in as well to hear about their current research on the life and work of Octavia E. Butler.

American Cypher is a suite of projects that respond to American stories about race and DNA. The first module of this project was a sound installation commissioned by Bucknell University, inspired by Thomas Jefferson (the 3rd US president) and Sally Hemings (his slave and, as DNA tests confirm, mother to his children). The piece that we’ve made for the Download series is a performance score. The image in the video was recorded in the basement of Jefferson’s plantation, Monticello, in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The slaveholder camouflaged his dependence, his parasitism, by various ideological strategies. Paradoxically, he defined the slave as dependent. —Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death

An Anti-Catalog was the work of the Catalog Committee of the group Artists Meeting for Cultural Change (AMCC). A landmark publication of the 1970s, its purpose was to protest the Whitney Museum of American Art’s bicentennial exhibition, which was titled “Three Centuries of American Art.” The Whitney show featured John D. Rockefeller III’s collection of mainly eighteenth and nineteenth-century American art–a collection that featured only one African American and one woman artist. The Catalog Committee, which consisted of fifteen artists and two art historians, spent almost a year producing an eighty-page book containing articles and documents. Originally conceived as a critique ...

The wave of protests brought about by the Black Lives Matter movement, coming after the lockdown imposed by the spread of the coronavirus, invites a comparison between this political and epidemical moment and the context that prevailed in the late 1980s, when AIDS was causing so much death in Western countries. The art and activism of the period have been thoroughly revisited over the past few years by art institutions. In the following text, I have freely adapted the disidentification methodology of the American artist Bradley Kronz to navigate recent works, exhibitions, and institutional trends. The aim is to create ...

In this conversation, we talk about Harsha Walia’s new fantastic book, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (Haymarket, 2021), which draws an international map of the border imperialist regime in its geographic, historic, and legal complexities. We then proceed in trying to envision the various forms of internationalist solidarities that emerge in the struggle against this global regime, following in particular Indigenous and/or Black resistance. Harsha Walia is the award-winning author of Undoing Border Imperialism (2013). Trained in the law, she is a community organizer and campaigner in migrant justice, anti-capitalist, feminist, and anti-imperialist movements, ...