Abstract

In 2013, the artist now known as American Artist changed their legal name to a generic singular, making themselves impermeable to authorial identification. Manifesting both their official entry in the art world and a withdrawal from it, this name change literally hacked Artist into the white American art canon, as their work now appears alongside Jackson Pollock's or Edward Hopper's in an internet search. This performative act was only the first in a series investigating issues of recognizable form and practices of identification. In 2021 Mother of All Demos II, a computer encased in dirt, the main piece in Artist's installation Black Gooey Universe, fringed on material formlessness as black goo oozed out of the keyboard, spilled over the desk and into the white box of the gallery space, its viscous drops suspended midair, rewriting the racial history of computer technology. This article traces these refusals of form in American Artist's Black Gooey Universe. Drawing on Zakiyyah Jackson's analysis of Western ontology, the article theorizes the edges in Artist's sculptures as sites of undoing, suspension, and speculation. Undoing the form of the GUI to find the “gooey,” Artist's installation ties an archaeological reframing of technology to a reimagining of anticolonial cosmology.

A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words, but their tasks. Thus formless is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form. What it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit.

—Georges Bataille, “Formless”

I examine the Heideggerian metaphysical ordering of human, animal, and stone as world relation. In approaching the world-shattering claim of black female flesh un/gendered's claim to being, I argue this is not an order to reify. This is an order to destroy.

—Zakiyyah Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World

In 2013, American Artist changed their legal name to a generic singular, making themselves impermeable to author-reference and identification. Manifesting simultaneously their official entry in the art world and a withdrawal from it, American Artist describes this name change as the “basis for an ambivalent practice—one of declaration: by insisting on the visibility of blackness as descriptive of an American artist, and erasure: anonymity in virtual spaces where ‘American Artist’ is an anonymous name, unable to be . . . validated by a computer as a person's name.”1 Further, this change for the generic at once made them unseizable to digital tracking and apprehension, in fact disintegrating the function of the author name as search category, and also literally hacked Artist into the white American art canon, as their work may now appear alongside Edward Hopper's or Cindy Sherman's in an internet search.

This performative act was only the first in a series investigating issues of recognizable form and practices of identification. In 2016, the performance A Refusal replaced all images on their social media profile with blue blocks, therefore suspending, delaying, as temporary as such a refusal may be, the construction of a digital identity. In 2018, first, and then again in 2021, the Mother of All Demos, a computer encased in dirt and the main piece in American Artist's installation Black Gooey Universe, fringed on formlessness as black goo seeped, spilled, dripped into the white box of the gallery space, its viscous drops rewriting the racial history of computer technology (fig. 1). This sculpture will be the main focus of this article. In Artist's work, I contend, operations of rematerialization and experimentations with formless materials echo a critique of canonical histories of art and media through shape-shifting practices that edge on formlessness—thus disarticulating authorship and selfhood in the name of the formless.

In the white cube of LABOR, a gallery in Mexico City, sits Mother of All Demos II, an old prototype of a personal computer encased in dirt.2 A black, vinyl-like matter oozes out of the keyboard and spills over the desk, while the black-lit computer screen displays the bluish hue of lines of code scripted in white characters (fig. 2). This piece calls to consider the aesthetics of a widespread medium, that of the PC, as carrying a history that, despite the discontinuities of technology and its propension to perpetual “newness,” is inscribed in and maintains the continuities of coloniality.3 From GUI (graphical user interface) to gooey, and from black screens to the so-called user-friendliness of white interfaces, Artist's installation explores these antagonisms in a way that affords a nonbinary, nonoppositional approach—namely, by way of formlessness.

A late 1960s creation of what we now call Silicon Valley, the idea of GUI as “gooey” is taken up by American Artist in a critique of the racial history of computer and software design.4 Specifically, Black Gooey Universe exposes this history's persistent attempts at erasing blackness from the so-called revolutionary world of personal computers while also making it the necessary, originary goo to depart from: an originary everything-nothingness from which whiteness is set to emerge in a big bang. In that sense, Artist's aesthetic intervention echoes Zakiyyah Jackson's Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World, wherein Jackson critiques the false idea that blackness was simply “left out” of the construction of the human in Enlightenment Europe, contending that it was not the effect of a myopic view of the world. On the contrary, as Jackson demonstrates, Enlightenment coproduced blackness and the enlightened subject, while nullifying this entanglement-in-being by abstracting, instrumentalizing, dark-matterifying blackness. In Artist's work, this tension is explored by way of goo, a material expression of formlessness, a form-in-suspension moving on the edge.5

Black Gooey Universe is an installation that shows us wrecked, wretched screens, and oozing motherboards.6 iPhones are melting (figs. 3 and 4), simmering in Coca-Cola (figs. 5 and 6), the US drink par excellence, decomposing and perhaps not coincidentally showing what it contains in suspension: sugar, sugar, sugar—a black, viscous, formless variation on Kara Walker's sugar sphynx.7 Precarious horizontality and verticality exhibit shattered and boiling devices that have stopped working—unless they now work in different ways, out of order. Edges provide tension in American Artist's installation: the edge of the table, the edge of a pile nearing its tipping point, the edge of the cracked screen that proliferates its own edges (fig. 7). These lines of tension are where Artist materializes the formless—which, I argue, constitutes a crucial motif in their aesthetics.

In what follows, I trace the role of edging as a modus operandi for formlessness in American Artist's Mother of All Demos. The edges in the Black Gooey Universe installation are all hard, displaying contrast between colors and textures, underscoring a liminality between a before-the-edge, an at-the-edge, a beyond-the-edge. I argue that these edges are the site for an exploration of formlessness, in conversation with and departing from a Bataillean lineage.8 I focus on the role of a specific edge for its significance in the Mother of All Demos sculpture: the edge of the table over which this black gooey universe finds its suspension in flight and holds itself in drops of solid slow motion. I consider edges here as sites for the coproduction of form and formlessness, where universal and universe, actuality and utopia are felt and engaged with—there, edging becomes a pivotal practice for the undoing of form as value-giving discourse and ordering principle. Mother of All Demos investigates the racial history of technology by pushing it over its edge to imagine a black gooey universe. That is, not the white GUI of Silicon Valley but rather a “universe” reaching beyond the construction of “world” and the Western metaphysical ordering thereof, which, in Zakiyyah Jackson's words, is “an order to destroy.”9

The Plasticity of These Drops: Black Mater of All Demos

“Dirt, monochrome CRT monitor, computer parts, Linux operating system, wood, asphalt”: A hybrid of raw materials and electronics, the Mother of All Demos is sharp and grainy (fig. 8). On each side of the computer, two hand imprints lay flat on the table, each finger covered in the liquid, black-brown matter leaving a trace where they rested. It is unclear whether these imprints signal the trace of a past presence—that the keyboard was just used—and/or whether they call for future use (place your hands here). To the left and right of the computer setup, the handprints are the only marker of presence of this user that is at once presupposed and produced by the graphical user interface.

Next, or perhaps first, we see the spill's drops (fig. 1), the elements contributing to the gooey signification and fabrication of time in the sculpture—a liquid curtain of asphalt drops suspended from the white desk, pulled by gravity toward the ground. As viscous specters of time, these drops of a material once soft and liquid enough to run down and over the edge of the table find a temporary form in what seems like a stretched-out present—because who knows the timeline of a drop of goo as it edges on formlessness.

Asphalt, also known as bitumen, is a binding agent. Mostly extracted through the mining of the sacred lands of eighteen First Nations and six Métis settlements also known as the Athabasca oil sands in Alberta, Canada, bitumen is widely used in construction. It was also used by Western painters in the nineteenth century to bind pigments—although it was quickly abandoned as it caused many paintings to deteriorate over time, affecting colors and damaging the canvas itself. The particularity of bitumen is that it belongs to the chemical compound category of the pitch, a viscous substance that may appear solid but actually behaves like a liquid. Asphalt is susceptible to movement and responds to gravity in the same way a liquid would, only in extra-slow motion. So-called pitch drop experiments demonstrate how viscous substances behave—some of these experiments stretch over nearly a century, as drops of bitumen take a decade to form and fall.

Let us zoom out for a moment. A set form (the computer) is shown in its formlessness, foregrounding a materiality unaccounted for, the gooware, the formless under/innerbelly of the capitalist beast. As already mentioned, the “gooey” is both an experimentation in black aesthetics and American Artist's repurposing of a word pun, a kind of metaphor by homonymy already employed by 1960s software developers, making it a complex, indeed all-over sticky goo of a concept. The play on GUI as gooey that American Artist materializes in formless asphalt suspensions thus originated in the very discourse that this installation sets to destabilize. Perhaps here a connection to literary theorist Sianne Ngai's explanation of the crucial role played by error-ventriloquizing in Marx's Capital is surprising but fruitful.10 Ngai refers to those long passages in Capital where one may think one is reading about Marx's own political economy—that is, his analysis and critique of capitalism—when in fact he is ventriloquizing the theories of the economists of his time, which he opposes and considers as errors. Similarly, American Artist's installation does the work of error-ventriloquizing white Silicon Valley by attuning to the “gooey,” taking the joke and its contradictions seriously (a GUI is absolutely gooey and is the opposite of gooey). Ventriloquizing the error to get to a black gooey universe is a way of temporizing, as the spill's drops materialize in its suspension, with the error and against the error.

Gooey is not the only verbatim reference to be distorted into formlessness. Mother of All Demos’ title is a reference to Douglas Engelbart's eponymous video demonstration of a computer mouse and basic word-processing software in 1968—not exactly yet a GUI, but a demonstration leaning toward similar ideas of the so-called neutral, universal white page on the screen. Here we see a reimagination of that moment, going back in time and showing us what a black gooey computer could look like—rather than out of order, out of this order. In American Artist's words:

As there can be no form to it, denying both a canonical hardware and interface, where does the black screen reside? Building on brokenness, or the break, we take up Frank Wilderson's proposal to remain in the hold, within a broken (too slow, too complex) interface, to analyze and comprehend a totalizing anti-blackness. Fred Moten's fantasy in the hold then opens a new line of inquiry: how a broken screen—situated against whiteness, unfixable, unfixed—might operate. When some say “black gooey is unusable and unknowable,” its users, programmers, those dwellers of brokenness, will reply “for who?”11

Staging a pause in the white GUI's production of a “canonical” user, Artist's “black screen” interrupts the mythology of the “Mother of All Demos” with a black gooey universe that can hold the broken and its users. Further, through Artist's aesthetic work, Engelbart's Mother of All Demos becomes another mother, a “black mater” in the sense that Jackson has established in Becoming Human.12 Jackson builds on Spillers to develop the concept of “black mater” (both mother and matter) as that which is absent from the Heideggerian order of things she critiques.13 While figured as void in the taxonomic telos of Western imperialist metaphysics, black mater nonetheless carries all of humanity on its shoulders: indexing “nonrepresentability” and a “precipice to nothingness” are foundational functions of Western onto-cosmology.14 Similarly, the black gooey computer exceeds and recedes form. From its asphalt-infused, dirt-encased hardware to its drops of liquid suspension, it edges slowly on formlessness, in endless plasticity, which Jackson defines as that which “puts being in peril because the operations of simultaneously being everything and nothing for an order—human, animal, machine, for instance—constructs black(ened) humanity as the privation and exorbitance of form.”15 Thus ventriloquizing white Silicon Valley, Artist creates a black gooey universe in the name of GUI/gooey, in the name of a mother—to find another goo, another mater. Both situated in, and moving, albeit slowly, between “privation and exorbitance of form,” Artist's goo figures the “unknowable” computer whose ambiguous formlessness manifests as materiality in flight.

Edging on/as Formlessness

Noticing the drops and their plasticity brings us to a theory of formlessness as edging: not only does Artist's work with formless aesthetics allow us to understand the edge as a site of experimentation in form, it also figures formlessness as a temporal notion and practice rather than a thing whose meaning and essence are to be grasped. This recalls the first line of Bataille's “Formless”: “A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words, but their tasks” (my italics).16 Before describing in more detail what this edging on/as formlessness entails in Artist's explorations in black goo, let us consider the other end of the aesthetic spectrum, specifically the 1990s–early 2000s “clear craze,” for which the transparent casings of Gameboys and iMacs of the time are iconic examples. Showing off the usually hidden mechanics of a mysterious machine, unveiling and veiling at once, satisfying a scopic drive, a racialized and gendered need to “look inside,” the computers of the clear craze sell the new media fantasy of transparency and ethereal hardware.17 American Artist's black gooey computer concurs in showing us something of the inside—except it is oozing out, moving, revealing itself rather than being revealed, it is taking on an agency that the transparent technology does not hold. The viscerality of the black goo suggests this oozing, yet it is worth noting that the liquid asphalt was most likely applied onto the keyboard, rather than actually spilling out of it. The point here is not to reify an inner/outer binary but to riff along the edges of this evocative oil spill making the black gooey into a living matter (the dirt suggests so as well), at the same time as its ontological status resists certainty. Similarly to media theorist and artist Hito Steyerl's attention to the paradigmatic shift in the regime of digital images, which, far from being taken by us (as one used to “take pictures”), take us (collecting and storing data), American Artist imagines and builds a computer that comes out of its shell rather than having us look into it.18

In the context of this sculpture referring to Engelbart's Mother of All Demos, the attention to the operations of transparency and opacity proves particularly relevant when considering media theorist Kris Cohen's reflections on the role of image superimposition in Engelbart's 1968 demonstration. In “Superimposed, Still” (2022), Cohen analyzes the dispositif deployed in the video: Engelbart's face was superimposed on the live image of the computer screen and the “white page” onto which he was inputting commands as he explained the function of a mouse and word-processing software. Cohen contends that the use of the formal device of superimposition as a translucent layering of his image onto the graphical screen is crucial to theorizing its racializing operations:

This is what matters to the racializing work of the graphical screen—not that this user is white, or that he wears a white button-down shirt and a dark tie or styles his hair with a wetted comb. What matters is that this user embodies a promise. A promise of superimposition, of the formalism of that relationship. Whatever I am, whatever I become, I will be superimposed upon whatever environment I come to occupy: graphical screen, web browser, social media feed. . . . In this sense, it matters less that the interface was made for white people or that it was made by white people (though both of these things are true). What matters is that it was made in the image of whiteness as a structure of superimposition.19

This structural superimposition is also designed into the transparent aesthetics of the clear craze that Artist's gooey computer stands in such stark contrast to. The Mother of All Demos’ saturated and opaque aesthetics trouble the formal operation of superimposition. I contend this is not done in an oppositional gesture; rather, we see a dynamic setup of liquefaction and unruly materiality that stretches along an edge, that figures edging as this processual, porous practice. Not entirely unlike transparency itself, and yet antagonistically disruptive, this opaque porosity of edging on/as formlessness snuffs out Engelbart's specter, and drips, indifferently, down the edge of the table.20

The Universe Dripping at the Edge of the Table

We saw the drops, we followed their movement on the edge as it materialized Artist's aesthetics for a black gooey. But what is this universe that the black gooey user, this “unknowable being” (Artist), is envisioning as possibility?21 Departing from the universal as the “ideological assertion of white neutrality” to reimagine what universe could alternatively mean, Black Gooey Universe resonates with queer theoretical reflections on the antiblack, racist, ableist, antitrans, and antiqueer violence of the categories of the “human” and the “universal.”22 In particular, Eric Stanley's chapter “Death Drop: Becoming the Universe at the End of the World” in Atmospheres of Violence aligns with this alternative use of the term universe. In this chapter, Stanley closely reads thirteen-year-old, gender-nonconforming Seth Walsh's suicide note, which ends with a wish: “Hopefully I become the universe.”23 Specifically, Stanley contends that “this fantasy of Enlightenment's self-description, which for Kant might be named the individual—the human—is the subtext of both the violence Seth endured and its extension as cure. In opposition, Seth's universe refuses the possessed individual of the universal—they hoped to become the shimmering particulate of possibility—the universe.”24 Seth's wish radically divests from the Enlightenment's categories of the universe, the human, and those other fundamental, world-ordering concepts a black gooey universe seeks to destabilize as well. “Hopefully I become the universe” holds both the reference to a totalizing violence—the Enlightenment's universe and its self-possessed individual, who may only wish in the mode of a selective universal—and the image of a radical openness—the universe as “shimmering particulate of possibility.” Artist, too, both refers to and counterimagines the antiblack frameworks of Western epistemology when proposing a literal gooey, and a black universe that is not invested in a Western taxonomy pivoting around the universal.25

In envisioning the universe as liquid asphalt, as “shimmering particulate of possibility,” edging becomes the processual encounter with possibility and void. This shimmer brings us in a sensorial space of vibration that echoes both the idea of edging as porous gesture and another scholar's work on the universe. Indeed, queer theorist and physicist Karen Barad's work on quantum field theory and the entanglement of matter has led them to theorize touch counterintuitively: as there is no clear line of demarcation between bodies and between things, there is no touch and there is only touch(ing oneself).26 In this cosmological practice staged by Artist's Black Gooey Universe, we may begin to understand edging in a Baradian key. As we follow the shape-shifting quality of bitumen, of a GUI turned gooey, we see that there is no edge, and only edging.

Paying attention to the role of an edge in black goo's movement thus yields an understanding of edging as a mode of formlessness, and of formlessness as an aesthetic expression of edging. This edging appears as the modus operandi to materialize a post-abolition universe, a “world” beyond the current order. During a studio visit with Simone Leigh in 2019, American Artist spoke of their future work in the following terms: “Looking toward the long-term trajectory of my work, I'm thinking about how to speak more broadly. Rather than just pointing to a specific moment and saying, ‘This is fucked up,’ I want to allude to the reality I would like to inhabit and what that might look like. Thinking about abolition or moments of political upheaval, what do we want to make after that?”27 This speculative impetus in “alluding” to a desired reality and practicing envisioning “what that might look like” is already at play in Mother of All Demos. In the same conversation with Leigh, Artist recalls a line from a talk by art historian and film scholar Rizvana Bradley: “Pure form is a consequence of perfect black death.”28 This relation between formlessness and blackness is what the Black Gooey Universe installation, with its broken yet functioning screens, unruly computers, and gooey devices, figures for the viewer to see. Similarly to its “unknowable” user and universe, the black gooey computer oscillates between opacity and self-revelation through spilling, undoing itself and the other facing it in the same movement—literally undoing the interface. More specifically, Artist's Black Gooey Universe explores formlessness as “blur” in Fred Moten's sense of the word: the distortion, blurring that comes from the “search for precision.”29 Artist's work may then also be called, in Kyla Wazana Tompkins's words, “deformalist,” in that it engages both very formally and distortingly, blurringly with a form (the computer, the GUI) dissolved into formlessness.30 In a gesture similar to Artist's own shape-shifting name change, the Mother of All Demos revisits Engelbart's ghostly demonstration to undo a cosmology and its order—the Heideggerian metaphysics that Zakiyyah Jackson critiques—by stretching lines of tension and antagonisms into the blur, by edging on/as formlessness.

Notes

1

Excerpted from American Artist's bio for their exhibition “My Blue Window” at the Queens Museum (October 2019–February 2020). See “My Blue Window,” Queens Museum, https://queensmuseum.org/exhibition/american-artist/ (accessed August 20, 2023). Now, over ten years after their name change, Artist's career is such that search engines recognize their name as name, rather than as a generic descriptor: the hacking is complete, perhaps at the cost of the original ambivalence.

2

This sculpture was first shown as part of the first iteration of the Black Gooey Universe installation at Housing gallery in Brooklyn, NY, in 2018. The sculpture was named Mother of All Demos. This essay focuses on Mother of All Demos II, which was produced, alongside other remade sculptures, for the second installment of Black Gooey Universe at Labor in 2021.

3

For a critique of new media's claim to newness, as well as technology's production of race, see Chun, “Somebody Said New Media”; Chun, “Race and/as Technology.” 

4

On Silicon Valley as “incubating whiteness,” see Artist, “Black Gooey Universe.” For an analysis of the environmental racism foundational to the Silicon Valley economy, see Pellow and Sun-Hee Park, Silicon Valley of Dreams.

5

In addition to Jackson's Becoming Human, my reading of Artist's treatment of matter in Black Gooey Universe is informed by Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness,” and Ferreira da Silva, “1 (life).” 

7

I refer here to Kara Walker's installation, which has provided an indelible image for the deep ties connecting US American sugar consumption to enslaved labor on cane fields: A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant, installed at the Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn, NY, from May to July 2014.

8

See the first epigraph to this article, from Bataille, “Formless,” 31. Bataille's short yet widely circulated text was notably the organizing concept for Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois's 1996 seminal exhibition at Centre Pompidou and eponymous book Formless: A User's Guide. Krauss and Bois's engagement with the Bataillean notion was recently critiqued for its unreflected abstraction, leading to depoliticization, in a special issue of November, “On L'Informe.” See, in particular, Dean et al., “Unfinished Work.” For another notable and recent engagement with formlessness in critical aesthetics, see Ruiz and Vourloumis, Formless Formation.

9

See the second epigraph to this article, from Jackson, Becoming Human, 85–86.

17

I refer here to the racial history of science and medicine by which the “entire captive community becomes a living laboratory” (Spillers, “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe,” 68). See also Snorton, Black on Both Sides.

18

See Steyerl's interview for Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery: “One used to think that one could take images of something, but now I think the relation is rather reversed, and images take whatever they want from yourself. It hasn't been a secret for a long time that images started basically scanning your lives for all sorts of clues and data about you, so basically we are now more or less embedded in images ourselves, and have to sort of deal with it.” Steyerl, “Harun Farocki and Hito Steyerl”).

20

My reference to indifference echoes Lauren M. Cramer's use of the term to think through black aesthetics in Belly (Hype Williams, 1998) and the “affective spatiality of anti-blackness” (Cramer, “Belly).

21

American Artist on the user as “unknowable being” in an interview with Kris Cohen:

Black goo seeps from the keys, it looks unappealing to touch, but two plastic gloves laying on either side imply the presence of a recent user. This tells the viewer that despite its apparent obsolescence this device is useable by some unknowable being, one that lives outside the trajectory of high technological design. . . . When I say “unknowable being,” I don't mean a non-being. What I'm referring to is the impossibility of the white men designing technology to ever empathize or understand the lived experience of someone outside of their demographic, that is the “unknowable being.” (Cohen, “Abstraction, the Irreconcilable”)

Note here that this interview discussed the first iteration of the Mother of All Demos sculpture, which, in 2018, included transparent plastic gloves where the 2021 version would leave the hand imprints bare. While the gloves gestured to a transparent-gooey interface, the hand imprints reinforce a sense of indexicality in the absent shape of the “unknowable user.”

25

Another image for the black gooey universe may be the one we see in Wu Tsang's film Moby Dick; or, The Whale (2022), where another goo is extracted and squeezed. This translucent, glittery goo aesthetically echoes the shots of the starry sky and the depths of the ocean from which a Fred Moten in divine Sub-Sub-Librarian drag reads and narrates through time, from a literal, literary underwater-undercommons.

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