Taking Care: The Question of AR, VR, and Blackness | Kimberly Bain

What counts as care when we create archives, repositories, and representations of people and life.

I can’t breathe. At once: the wheezing out of a severely singular experience. Yet and also: a hailing of the social, political, economic, and environmental phenomena surrounding Eric Garner’s loss of breath.

My dissertation, On Black Breath: A Theory and Praxis, undertakes a partial genealogy of breath as it has been racialized within the project of modernity. I argue that Eric Garner’s “I can’t breathe,” sits amongst the larger and longer singularity of Black breath being circumscribed and suffocated, while concomitantly highlighting the struggle to resist and exist within this project. I offer up the term Black breath as a lexicon through which we can thread together new histories, theories, and philosophies of the biopolitical project of modernity in order to expand the critical grammars of the contemporary moment. Vulnerability to loss of breath has been a formative figure in the Black performative, literary, and lived tradition, one that provides if not a praxis of liberation, then a kind of radical sociality, a kind of quantum entanglement.

I offer up the term Black breath as a lexicon through which we can thread together new histories, theories, and philosophies of the biopolitical project of modernity in order to expand the critical grammars of the contemporary moment.

The struggle I have found over and again while tarrying with breath and breathing is how to represent and practice something that is simultaneously material and ephemeral. In many ways this same question is one that performance studies scholars struggle with in their work. However, the concern for me has always been that breathing and breath are far more ubiquitous, yet also far more at risk of disappearing entirely for specific communities.

To my intensive, I brought the question: what are the affordances of the specific forms (of inquiry, critique, methodology, text, evidence, and so forth) we turn to? How do we enact care in the projects we undertake, knowing that the people and communities we study, represent, and often come from as people with lives, not static data?

Douglas Kearney offers a mode through which to think about the affordances of the written, through the ways we use and represent text: the textu(r)al—simultaneously the textual and the textural. In looking for ways to make my own work textu(r)al—in looking for ways to not only represent or capture life, but to live it in the work—I turned to digital methods because the written form (on its own) did not afford me with the space and techniques to engage with questions of embodiment in a way that felt corporeal. For me, this meant engaging with the fields of augmented and virtual reality not to approach some essential and totalizing truth; rather I deploy these methods as a mode of rethinking the forms through which we might theorize and articulate the ephemeral, ineffable, the absent-presence, relationality, the immaterial materiality of race, and the very air we breathe.

Working with augmented and virtual reality of course raises questions of care—how to attend care-fully to lived lives and living lives. We might think to the dangers of uncritically doing this kind of work, as in the case of Childish Gambino partnering with Google for their Pixelmoji service. In the initial ads for the collaboration, we see Gambino and his Pixelmoji dancing in tandem, his Pixelmoji (we’re to assume) copying his movements. However, soon the augmented version of Gambino peels off, watching the real Gambino continue to dance and show off his moves. The augmented-Gambino is skeptical, the shot zooming in on their/its changing facial expression—a look off to the side, a twist of the mouth, skepticism and friendly disdain written on their/its features. Real-Gambino lays down the gauntlet, which augmented-Gambino takes up, performing its own dance moves to a similarly skeptic real-Gambino.

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Then a switch occurs. While dancing, the two Gambinos switch positions, real entering into the space of the augmented, augmented entering into the space of the real—the boundary between the two collapsing. The dance-off concludes when augmented-Gambino (who now may be the real Gambino?) explodes into a shimmer of light in the shape of the digital form. Real-Gambino has lost to augmented-Gambino, the latter proving to be more real and more entertaining (if the rules of the average dance battle apply) to the audience. #pixeldanceoff

What’s always rubbed me the wrong way about this collaboration is not so much the ad itself, but rather the Pixelmoji project as a whole.  It offers users a digital, virtual, “augmented” version of Childish Gambino that can be projected onto their world to perform pieces like “This is America,” which already has been criticized for its tone deafness. Exacerbating the issue, users can take selfies with this Black artist and, in the process of doing so, have the augmented-Gambino replicate their facial expressions (we see now why the ad heavily emphasized zooming in on the augmented-Gambino’s facial expressions). If they smile, they/it does; if they frown, they/it does too.

The dangers of uncritically applying augmented reality (or in turn, virtual reality) to matters that have to do with race couldn’t be clearer. During my intensive, the group discussed not only the possible pitfalls of augmented and virtual reality, but also what it costs—and what counts as care when we create archives, repositories, and representations of people and life. Although we couldn’t come up with a wholesale answer beyond the truism that every project has different requirements, we did agree that it is far easier to enact violence upon these digital bodies than not, if only because the latter involves questioning oneself and reminding oneself of the impetus and ethics behind the project. But this is exactly what we must do—every step of the way.

About the Author

Kimberly Bain is a 2019 AADHum Scholar and a Ph.D. Candidate in English and Interdisciplinary Humanistic Study at Princeton University. For more, visit kimbain.com.