Out of Place
Viewing technology in the longue durée foregrounds how slavery undergirds conditions of contemporary extraction, surveillance, and the insistence on positing knowledge as outside of those arrangements—practices that produce today’s technologies. Contributors to this issue of Logic(s), “Out of Place,” challenge the logic that racism is contaminating and disabling the pure disembodied model, or that race is principally a site for enumerating harms that can be subsequently extinguished.
Rather, the analysis throughout these pages underscores how race is constitutive of how models are developed and deployed. Beyond this, the vulnerability to premature death that digital infrastructures enable, is due to the ways those of us rendered out of place are disciplined into the flows of projected outcomes—or, if noncompliant, wholly removed from the dataset (and society).
Editor’s Letter: Out of Place
An introduction to issue 22 by Editor in Chief J. Khadijah Abdurahman
Concept Note
An articulation of this issue’s special visual arts curation, which explores flesh as the violent prefiguration for digital technology’s need to segment, extract, and elide the agency of matter—making people into digits, land into territory, and information into currency.
in the coherence, we weep
A series of prints exploring the critical potential of incoherencies through mapping methodologies across media, opening glitches that allow for moments of critical self-reflection and knowledge production.
New Air
Stills from a single-channel video that considers air as a vehicle of bilocality, transporting not just physical bodies but also the intangible essence of identity across landscapes and time.
Data Studies 2.1: We shall thank you to carefully examine and fit
A series of quilts and weavings created from algorithmic data that is translated and stitched into color-patterned tales to visualize Black migration across geographies and time.
Axis V
A site-specific multimedia installation examining conditions and textures of fugitive errantry and how “external circumstances metabolize into chronic psychosis”
Song Book: The Quotient of Desire
From Morrison’s trifecta: an eponymous book, score and performance piece in homage to late composer Julius Eastman, which holds “patterns of desire in tension with computational models that dispossess”
Black Computational Thought: A Conversation with Romi Ron Morrison
An extended conversation with the artist and scholar about Metabolic Flesh and the origin stories of Black computational thought
Poems Are Also Spells with Jada Renée Allen
On dark-skinned Black femme abolitionist poetics
Rideshare Drivers United versus the Prop 22 Consensus with Nicole Moore and Alvaro Bolainez
Reflections on the organization’s organizing tactics in the years since California’s passage of Proposition 22
Psychopathic Imaging: Linking Brain Scans to Criminal Behavior with Oliver Rollins
A critical dialogue on the use of functional MRI for determining criminal pathology and the eugenic preconditions of neuroscience research
The San Diego Unhoused Collective with Jason Ritchie and Ken Sargosa
A discussion with formerly unhoused organizers and artists on surveillance and social control
Mapping Black Dispossession in San Francisco with Ralowe T. Ampu and Eric A. Stanley
Insights from abolitionist organizing on the implications of computation in municipal projects of mass displacement in San Francisco
Complicating the US–China Binary: Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing
A critical essay examining how settler colonialism in Taiwan informs the country’s contemporary dominance of semiconductor fabrication
Trees, Trade, and Text Messages: Scenes from a Palestinian Spatial Politic
Linking her uncle’s agricultural methods in the diaspora to informal networks of mutual support in Palestine, Barakat draws out attention to an Indigenous Palestinian present.
The Ongoing Fight against Electronic Visit Verification
Electronic visit verification continues to be a method of limiting both disabled patients and their caregivers’ autonomy. Ming’s ethnographic interviews provide further insight into their ongoing fight against digital control.
To Resist Annihilation: Paternity, Inheritance, and Love against Surveillance Medicine
On surveillance medicine’s capacity to entrench the biological family as a site for monitoring and premature death. Samudzi thoughtfully reflects on her personal fallout following her father’s cancer diagnosis to the broader bio-surveillance of Palestinian life under genocide and occupation.
substance
Two poems
Nocturne
Two poems