read the manifesto

 
 
82 Reflections is a live streaming digital audio-visual experience shaped by and in response to deep social disruption caused by pandemic, ongoing demands for social justice, and the uncertainty, fear, and hope these concurrent tragedies elicit. 82 Reflections is a piece of Pandemic Art. To collect materials for this art the artist employed a socially distant documentation practice focused on the ongoing demand for an end to systemic racism and white supremacy in his community of downtown Dallas, Texas. Audio recordings, digital images, and digital video were collected between May and October 2020. The artist collected these materials in a socially distant manner due to his chronic lung conditions and risk for contracting covid19. The artist then constructed a small sculpture with household items and small reflective surfaces. Training a lo-fi webcam onto the sculpture, materials captured by live video web stream are glitched, reflected, and looped, as symbolic of complete disruption, uncertainty, and misunderstanding as a starting point for difficult transformation for social justice. Video projections reflect from the sculpture create ambient lighting and patterns that symbolize the bringing down of barriers to change-making dialogue and action. They further signify that difficult dialogue has occurred and progress has been made, but more is needed to continue positive social justice action and sustainable change. Glitched, reflected, and looped audio of 82 recordings of protestors, law enforcement, the artist, and materials within the sculpture create instability, a necessary condition for meditation and reflection on difficult and transformational racial dialogue especially directed to White Americans. The work is situated within an emergent artistic movement, Pandemic Art, created in response to covid19 and social conditions. Pandemic Art is created through improvisation with readily available materials that are safe, practical, and feasible.
 

 
82 Reflections is a window into chaos, a window into cacophony.
 
This art is about being robbed of the freedom to take your body onto the streets to protest against systemic racism and white supremacy.
 
This art is about smelling tear gas smoke after a canister has exploded.
 
This art is about seeing tear gas canister blast marks on the sidewalks the next day and remembering the sound of them exploding.
 
This art is about the tear gas canister blast marks being washed or trampled away.
 
This art is about pandemic and the terror that I feel every time I go outside. It’s about chronic asthma. It’s about the fear of choking to death.
 
This art is about knowing the feeling of being robbed of breath and how fucking terrible that is and trying to understand how another human being could purposefully do that to someone else and call it “law enforcement”.
 
This art is informed by Barad who theorizes as a form of touch or being in touch (Barad 207). This art is a form of touch or remaining in touch when we’ve been robbed of that opportunity.
 
This art is about hearing the collective voices of protestors every day for nearly five months, recording them, manipulating and layering them, multiplying them.
 
This art is about knowing that the protestors will come roughly at the same time everyday and being worried when they’re running late.
 
This art is about getting close to the protestors, once, on street level, to show them I’m listening and that I’m invested and that I am with them.
 
This art is about raising a fucking fist and power to the people.
 
This art is about wearing a mask.
 
This art is about raising your fist and being acknowledged by someone else who is raising theirs. Power to the people.
 
This art is about hearing police helicopters every time protestors are on the march.
 
This art is informed by Penny who observes that environments embody thinking and condition possibilities (218).
 
This art is about Downtown, Dallas, my neighborhood, my people. Power to the people.
 
This art is about Botham Jean Boulevard.
 
This art is about wanting so goddamn desperately to be protesting on the streets but being denied that right by your health.
 
This art is about being self-isolated for about a year.
 
This art is an attempt to make some connection with other human beings while being self-isolated.
 
This art is about my doctor telling me, actually ordering me, to self-isolate until I am vaccinated against covid19.
 
This art is about sometimes breaking the rules to visit my family.
 
This art is about being sick for a really, really, really long time and finally doing something about it.
 
This art is about being at a crossroads, an intersection. Many protests passed on the intersections below my apartment. This art is about collecting, recording, manipulating, preserving, and live streaming it in perpetuity forever. Power to the fuckin people.
 
This art is about forgetting what normal felt like and wondering what a new normal will be.
 
This art is about 73,541,516 people who voted for a fascist.
 
This art is about 73,541,516 people that we need to be in conversation with.
 
This art is about reading the names of Black people who have been murdered by cops and stopping because it’s too fuckin many and I can’t read any more because I am crying.
 
“HOW MANY? TOO FUCKIN MANY.”
 
This art is about all of the artists during pandemic lockdown that came to downtown Dallas after the murder of George Floyd to make art in solidarity.
 
This art is a live stream for George Floyd. Forever.
 
George Floyd. Forever.
 
This art is about all of the uplifting messages on street artwork.
 
This art is about AMERI KKK A.
 
This art is about particle board. Window cover and street art canvas.
 
This art is abstract art that expresses many different things at the same time. Complexity in visual form.
 
This art is about panic, the panic I feel when I hear the police shooting rubber bullets and tear gas. The panic I feel when I hear glass breaking or tires screeching or helicopters above or all of that together.
 
This art is about your paying attention to something for a really, really long time just like I have.
 
This art is a shared experience.
 
This art is for your body. Visceral. Thinking.
 
This art is about my dog, Okami, who felt everything going on around him, protests and all, and barked alot. He knew what was going on. He felt it. He knows.
 
This art is about my wife who stood at open windows and banged pots and pans in rhythm with protesters below. Power to the people.
 
This art is about my friends in Oakland, California and New York City, New York who educated me about the Black Panthers and about Black Wall Street. Power to the People.
 
This art is about my beautiful wife, a Queen, immigrant, woman of color.
 
Power to the people.
 
We want justice. And if we don’t get it, we’ll shut it down.
 
This art is about hearing the Dallas police very clearly, their voice amplified, over a mass of thousands of protestors. They want us to go home but we won’t go home. And even if we’re self isolated in an apartment for a year we’re gonna do this shit anyway.
 
This art is about the black police officers in the Dallas Police Department. Brothers, sisters, working to change things from the inside.
 
This art is about opening a window every day for 82 some odd days.
 
This art is about closing the same window every day for 82 some odd days.
 
This art is about going to the window every day for 82 some odd days to listen.
 
This art is about letting the chaos in and getting comfy with it.
 
This art is my meditation while sitting in the fire. Want to know what it sounds like? Want to know what it looks like? Want to join me?
 
This art is about the intersection of Ervay and Commerce in Downtown Dallas Texas.
 
This art is about the intersection of Ervay and Main Street in Downtown Dallas Texas.
 
This art is about the window display in the Neiman Marcus building in downtown Dallas, there for an entire summer 2020, with a caption “imagine yourself somewhere else”.
 
This art is about that Donald Trump flag in that window.
 
This art is about the business owners in Downtown Dallas who covered their windows with particle board but kept the artwork painted there. Power to the people.
 
This art is about defunding the Dallas Police Department.
 
This art is about the Other America (King). The other America that still exists.
 
This art is about feeling progressively comfortable with discomfort, but remembering when I wasn’t.
 
This art is about being locked in an apartment with your emotions and needing something to do with them that isn’t self destructive.
 
This art is about knowing that people have to change but not knowing what to do about it. I’ll start with changing myself.
 
This art is about prolonged attention.
 
This art is about writing it down for you.
 
This art is about surviving it.
 
This art is about doing social justice as a white person. Not just saying that you are doing social justice. Doing it. Not just Tweeting it. Not just Facebook liking it. Not just Instagraming it. Doing it everywhere. On the streets, in apartments, in schools. Everywhere. Not just saying it. Doing it. Forever. Live. In perpetuity. Power to the people.
 
This art is about a conversation with white people, to ask the tough questions about guilt, shame, fragility, anxiety. To be honest with ourselves about how we feel.
 
People of color do not need a white person such as myself to tell them anything about systemic racism.
 
White people can’t let their discomfort paralyze them from participating in social justice.
 
This art is about taking artwork that isn’t yours and making it yours. Power to appropriation.
 
This art is about choosing not to be comfortable for a very, very long time and finding it fascinating.
 
This art is about resistance and solidarity.
 
This art is about many voices and expressions together, inseparable. Forever. Live. Alive.
 
This art is about the emancipatory power of improvisation as a tool in collective struggle, as a form of resistance, towards actively participating in change while evading oppressive logic, while evading other plans. (Harney and Moten 79).
 
This art is about resisting “a design for life” where meanings are fixed only by privileged intellectuals (Manic Street Preachers).
 
This art was done with my hands and digital technologies. Technologies are fundamental to our self awareness but they alter us. Balsamo and Landers describe this state as a TechnoCultural condition that requires a different understanding of what we are and what defines us (Module 10).
 
Some of this art was made while being vaccinated against covid19.
 
Power to the people.
 

 
Balsamo, Anne, and Sean Landers. Introduction to TechnoCulture. Kendall Hunt Publishing Company ed., 2020.
 
Barad, K. “On Touching-The Inhuman That Therefore I Am v1.1.” Differences, vol. 23, no. 3, 2012, pp. 206-223., doi:10.1215/10407391-1892943.
 
Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Minor Compositions, 2013.
 
King, Martin Luther. Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement — The Other America. Civil Rights Movement Archive, https://www.crmvet.org/docs/otheram.htm. Accessed 29 Mar. 2021.
 
Manic Street Preachers. “A Design for Life.” Everything Must Go, Epic Columbia Sony Music, 1996.
 
Penny, Simon. Making Sense: Cognition, Computing, Art, and Embodiment. The MIT Press, 2017.