Data Emotionalization and Racial Technology

Surrounded by and through Beavers and Walls, the new work she created for Eyebeam’s exhibition Outside/In, artist Torkwase Dyson and writer Joon Oluchi Lee will engage in a collaborative dialogue about history, technology, race, and the feeling of the sublime. They will touch deeply upon how an historical space gets animated beyond and outside its own time, and the role of the artist in engaging the built environment of this history.

Among the questions they will ask: how does the trauma of environmental racism reside and transform within the materiality of spatial sites? How can diagrammatic abstraction compel our acknowledgment of geographic patterns and architecture related to these histories? What role does technology have in the narrativizing of that history, and how we enfold it into the cells of our own being?

Torkwase Dyson is a 2014-2016 Eyebeam Research Resident. She deconstructs natural and built environments. In her practices of painting, drawing and sculpture, as well as in her long-term architectural projects, Dyson investigates spatial and ecological dignity through place-making. Dyson is based in Brooklyn, New York and is lecturer in painting/printmaking at Yale. She will be included in the upcoming exhibition, A Constellation, at the Studio Museum.

Joon Oluchi Lee is the author of two books of fiction, 94 (Publication Studio Portland, 2015) and Lace Sick Bag (Publication Studio Portland, 2013).  His essays, including “The Joy of the Castrated Boy” (Social Text, F/W 2005), have appeared in various academic and alternative publications. His writing and textual performances can be found on twitter @girlscallmurder, girlscallmurder.com and lipstickeater.blogspot.com.