Editorial Statement

[T]he word technology has nothing to do with silicone chips; it has always been about how beings articulate with other matter to perform tasks and to understand, through their interactions with objects, the world. (Rua M. Williams)

I’m consistently thinking about these technologies in ways that counter the current push to remove any reference to equity, any reference to racial equity, any reference to treating us as full human beings and simply replacing the ways that we engage and deal with one another in a very non-dignified way. (Tawana Petty)

— From “Mycelium Is Technology Is Power Is Poetry: Tawana Petty and Rua M. Williams in Conversation with Taraneh Fazeli,” April 14, 2025

In the conversation these two quotes are drawn from, we editors wondered what we mean by the word “technology”: “The word technology has such a broad range of possible meanings and often gets very simplified at a policy level to focus on whatever new tech has a lot of investment behind it. These days, with tech giants exercising increasing influence over governments and constituting new constellations of empire, it makes sense that when someone says technology, artificial intelligence or the auto industry come to the fore. But technology is also a chair, a cane, an ancestral ritual, the Underground Railroad.”

Technological innovations have always been part of contested future imaginaries. Highlighting the then-recent release of ChatGPT-4, Shift Space 3 editor Claudia La Rocco reflected that “it’s probably always a weird moment” to be writing about the intersection of art and technology. From the advent of paper to streetlights to computers, developing technologies are often perceived as primary determinants of the future. But remember, to some, the future ubiquity of 3D televisions and the metaverse seemed inevitable. New technology’s impact and staying power is always under negotiation.

As ChatGPT’s present and possible future benefits are weighed against currently unsustainable human and energy costs, we echo La Rocco’s sentiment when reflecting on Artificial Intelligence’s current era. Now, AI administers love lives, telling jokes for those seeking connection on dating apps. AI enables conversations across languages. AI writes class essays and job applications and code for students and workers who are warned that AI will soon put them out of a job. AI spellchecked this text. An AI likeness of a deceased person bestows forgiveness on the defendant deemed complicit in his death. AI, trained to analyze satellite imagery, locates small mineral mines in the Congo, with hopes to enable investigations into brutal worker abuses. AI scans cancer tests, furthering efforts for early detection. AI sets targets and sends bombs in Gaza, killing masses of civilians; the high-tech origin masks the IDF increasing the “acceptable collateral damage” regardless of potential for the technology to be more discriminate. AI brings tech bro-ification to the US government via Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which dismantles essential programs while harvesting data that could benefit Musk’s private companies.

But AI is not the one doing all this; it is presently a tool based on data inputs. If AI’s development is indeed inevitable, it matters who builds, owns, and profits from it: from nation-states to tech bros, hegemonic power presides over much of the damage we assign to technology. Yet linguists, activists, and artists can make use of AI too. Artists use, build, and train it, to explore its potential, analyze its function, and imagine its future purposes. When considered together, the ways that artists use, interrogate, and reinvent technologies — their methods and materials — function as both cultural analysis and cultural memory of the possibilities and pitfalls of all kinds of technology — old, new, simple, complex, dominant, popular, minor, anachronistic, neglected. To model how to live now and imagine living otherwise, the artists in this issue use AI and engines and robots. They use looms and lenses. They use seeds and pencils. They use data sonification and drum machines…

Artists process technologies and put them to use imaginatively, unexpectedly, creating possibilities that don’t come with how-to instructions. Testing limits, artists repurpose technologies to different ends than their designers intended and rework tools and materials developed for industry at home or the studio. They ensure traditional technologies endure and pick up technologies on the edge of obsolescence or in advance of mainstream uptake. They innovate solutions to problems unaddressed by the market and analyze and critique how technologies function culturally. In doing so, they sometimes alter patterns of use or become part of a trend themselves.

Natalia Zuluaga, editor of Shift Space 2, aptly described a pause that exists between immobilizing distrust and unquestioned faith in technologies and highlighted that a moment of clarity can be found in that distance. Here artists can generatively reside, holding possibilities for the longer-term meanings of everyday technologies open while popular culture, mainstream media, and policy rush to determine and simplify. As in past issues, the artists and writers here delicately occupy that stretched temporality — their artwork is that pause.

About this issue

This year’s artist recipients of Knight Arts + Tech Fellowships, administered by United States Artists, offer a glimpse into the breadth of approaches to technology used by contemporary artists across the country. Each fellow was chosen on the quality of their individual practice, yet several methodological connections struck us. This year tinkering abounds with technologically impressive feats made using inventive and unconventional approaches. Fellows fluidly combine ancient and new technologies offering substantial evidence against linear narratives of technological progression.

Shift Space 5 includes two parts: pieces about the artist fellows and fieldnotes on technology and art. The fieldnotes build upon earlier Shift Space issues, which focused on decolonial technological practices, the intersection of literary writing and tech, and artists as uniquely positioned observers of tech. Reading across both parts connects purposeful approaches to art and technology by artists nationally to a broader set of concerns.

Over time, Shift Space aims to expand its support of art writing in the eight cities Knight focuses on to parallel the fellowship’s support of artists. This issue is the first with a majority of the writers connected to these cities. We were excited by this approach since, in shared work beyond this context, we are dedicated to supporting writers doing place-based writing amidst the gravitational pull of major cities on art criticism and publishing. In pairing writers and artists, beyond shared geography, we considered other affinities like identity or research as well as art writing approaches that might offer something different from previously published writing on each artist. As a result, this cohort of writers embody a wide range of authorial positions and methodologies resulting in stylistically diverse texts.

Fellows’ texts

In their conversation “Remembering the Dirt: Attunement, Residue, Salvage,” Alexis Pauline Gumbs and fellow Ash Arder talk about honoring the knowledge of Black ancestors whose ways of tending land and repairing machines offer methodological and ethical lessons. They discuss practices of creating conditions for cultivating memory and the possibility of what they describe as homefulness, and the role of the artist as one who attunes to the energies, agency, and stories of the matter at her feet and her hand, offering her attention in the service of transformation.

In “Techno-Vernacular Expressionism,” DeForrest Brown, Jr. situates Matthew Angelo Harrison’s work in a broader history of Black techno-vernaculars and technological innovation. Examining Harrison’s adoption of technologies used in the auto industry in his home city of Detroit/Waawiiyaatanong and the Afrofuturist sonic myth-science of the city’s legendary music duo Drexciya, Brown, Jr. connects the “prototypical possibilities” that Harrison finds in sculptural practice with the necessity of art, music, technological innovation, and myth in the creation of homelands by dispersed people.

In “Always a Poem,” Monica Uszerowicz reflects on a visit to Antonia Wright’s studio and memories of her encounters with Wright’s art, exploring the confluence of writing and locatedness along Miami’s waterways within. Uszerowicz reveals how Wright’s daily writing practice is an endlessly unspooling thread that draws together a materially diverse body of work where technology records, re-enacts, or re-presents the ways that reproductive bodies exist within ecological and political systems.

In “Akea Brionne: Reconsidering Photographic Materiality in the Digital-AI Age,” Tamir Williams applies an art historical analysis to Brionne’s use of expanded photographic techniques, such as digital weaving and AI image generation. Thinking with Tina Campt, Williams explores the affective, tactile, and ethical registers of Brionne’s processing of family archive photographs and AI composites of dream imagery. Williams argues for a nuanced approach to digital materiality and proposes that artistic craft and labor can slow down and thicken the experience of photographic imagery.

In “The Planetary Clouds of Michelle Lopez,” by tracing the reappearing figure of the cloud across Lopez’s research and several artworks, Denise Ryner proposes that Lopez’s installations work on an atmospheric or environmental scale to extend sensory awareness of systemic interconnectedness in ways that may engender a humbler imaginary of the place of the human. In her materialist reading of clouds, Ryner suggests a “planetary” perceptual framework disrupts notions of what binds the collective in the 20th century’s grand nationalistic and ideological narratives of technological advancement.

Fieldnotes

The practices of this year’s fellows affirm the role of place to creative and critical work — whether place be remembered, imagined, or where one is present. Each essay draws out specific encounters and experiences of locatedness and dislocation. Since three of this year’s fellows are based in Waawiiyaatanong/Detroit, our entry point to imagining the fieldnotes started there. Taraneh has been based there since 2018, and even though Cannach lives in Europe, our collaborative work has been greatly influenced by the city’s unique cultural and political terrain.

The nation’s largest majority-Black city with a long history of radical institutions, Waawiiyaatanong/Detroit has an important base of innovation across scales and sectors, from industry and science to community-led social structures, to music, to murals, to Afrofuturistic art. The metro area’s significant Black, Arab-American and broader SWANA, Indigenous, Mexican-American, and other vital immigrant communities fuel distinct cultural and organizing scenes and cross-community collaborations. During the city’s 2013 bankruptcy, democracy was withdrawn and emergency management imposed — all intended to dampen social, political, and labor organizing power. This was part of a longer process described as organized abandonment — intentional disinvestment by government and corporations that’s further entrenched through carceral “solutions” and ever new types of extraction.¹ Now Waawiiyaatanong/Detroit faces gentrification, cultural whitewashing, and outside billionaire developers — due to how racialized disinvestment was enacted to crush people power at a stronger intensity than other cities, it offers a unique site to explore viable resistance.

Our shared work examines the limits of disability as understood under liberal humanist frameworks, and how disability, racialization, colonialism, and imperialism are structurally interdependent.² While we love our disabled bodyminds and embrace their wisdom, there is a limit to pride when faced with the reasons that many who have disability experiences may not claim the identity. The models we critique rely on people being able to exercise rights to obtain support from the corporate-state matrix’s infrastructure — which gets withdrawn under organized abandonment. Withholding resources and other forms of racially targeted violence produces chronic illnesses, pain, and trauma — disability and debility that gets carried individually and collectively. Building on how debility as a continuum disrupts the able-bodied/disabled binary, some mobilize the concept to examine how debility is intentionally produced globally. For example, Jasbir Puar wrote compellingly prior to the current genocide on how Palestinian people are purposefully disabled and debilitated by the Israeli state, but only deaths were counted.³ In Waawiiyaatanong/Detroit, there is a deep practice of creating community-led liberatory alternatives to structural debilitation furthered by exchanges with others experiencing similar in places like Puerto Rico or Palestine. Coming after Shift Space 4’s focus on decolonial, global non-Western approaches to technology, this issue’s fieldnotes focus on people working against the structures of empire from within the belly of the beast that is the USA today.

For this issue’s fieldnotes, Tawana Petty and Rua M. Williams have written essays, which, respectively, address concerns of racial equity and disability justice in relation to tech. Petty’s work addresses racism, surveillance, and digital divides and is rooted in Waawiiyaatanong/Detroit with national impacts; she is an organizer, policy creator, poet, and mentor. Williams’ work addresses disabled people’s experiences of assistive tech, the limits of institutional approaches to disability, and the role of pedagogy in institutional spaces like the university; they are a computer scientist, academic researcher, and educator.

“Mycelium Is Technology Is Power Is Poetry” offers an expansive, conversational entry-point to Petty’s and Williams’ work. They cover how technologies too often imagine disability and race as discretely constituted, ways they resist such siloing in their work, and how they utilize art and pedagogy to imagine and build more just relationships with technology across all scales.

Tawana Petty’s essay, “Interrogating Detroit’s Innovative Future,” deconstructs media representations to dispel criminalizing and “comeback” narratives of the city that are used to justify anti-Blackness, surveillance, displacement, extraction, and gentrification. She outlines how massive technology investment is operating in a city decimated by environmental racism and provides historical and present examples of resistance through visionary organizing.

Rua M. Williams’ essay, “Cyborg Realities / Cyborg Imaginaries / Cyborg Revolutions /,” gives a multidimensional window into the work of the CoLiberation Lab, their research lab at Purdue University, which works on research projects exploring technologies for Disabled-led action and transformation. The essay provides descriptive vignettes of designs to address different limitations in assistive tech, illustrated with Williams’ vivid digital drawings.

How we make is as important as content

As writers we’ve found editorial processes to commonly be opaque, hierarchical, and compressed; dialogues with editors often leave us simply validating our ideas rather than receiving support evolving them in a way we feel comfortable with. It’s exhausting. In editing Shift Space 5, how we made the publication was as important as its content. To pull back the curtain, here’s a bit about what went into making a more accessible online publication for all involved — readers, writers, artists, editors. We hope it might help some of you reading to navigate parallel concerns with web technologies yourself.

Over the years we’ve spent navigating making institutionally-hosted spaces accessible, we often take on the work, uncompensated. When sharing our work in institutional contexts, we’ve been challenging each other to only do so where we can reliably “give the work back to the institution.” This means not doing everything ourselves, instead asking the right questions to ensure good access is present. This involves both a measure of pedagogical sharing and requiring the institution to prioritize access in process and output. We are not universal or web design experts, but we offer what we’ve learned in cross-disability arts communities.

Managing Editor Allie Linn has been committed to access from this publication’s origin, offering texts with no paywall, high-quality audio versions, image descriptions (IDs), and fonts with greatest accessibility. After discovering issues when testing page navigation with text-to-speech-software (TTSS) and free accessibility audits, we suggested an access plan for Shift Space 5 and the organization’s websites more broadly.⁴ Firstly, we asked United States Artists and Team, the designers, to perform a full audit and manually test TTSS navigation: it’s important to not just follow the “rules,” but to test how the technology functions for navigating non-visually. Secondly, we asked United States Artists to eventually establish paid focus groups with cross-cultural and cross-disability community members to gather user-experience feedback and advice. Thirdly, we worked towards closer equivalence between the audio and text versions of each piece. Descriptive Video Works, the audio company, already did their best to match the subjectivities of authors and voice actors, parallelling best practices with interpreters. To hear IDs, previous issues required listeners to use TTSS to navigate to their in-text placement. This issue now offers two separate audio tracks — one with the full body text and another with image captions, IDs, and author bios. We removed in-text hyperlinks, since the audio version does not read them in-line, and placed links in endnotes with a clear header for TTSS to easily navigate to. (See the access page in sidebar for details.)

In tandem were considerations for ourselves and contributors. We informed each writer about the full list of artists and shared information on the format and approach of other contributions, contextual information which is often left opaque in similar invitations. We endeavored towards sharing the reasoning behind our feedback and encouraged them to be in contact with the artists as desired. Linn took on labor of writing IDs and finding images, always running them by contributors for approval. Negotiating consent was important, a fact which came up in a conversation weighing the vulnerabilities and security issues of sharing one’s voice online during an era of deepfakes against the power of hearing one’s own voice in dialogue with another’s in the struggle. It also came up around a difference in the reading of one artist’s body of work and how that manifested in the writer’s text; through feedback towards mutual understanding and revision, we ultimately upheld the value of the writer’s considered perspective. The process of making this issue occurred during what felt like a particularly intense “time on the clock of the world,” and life kept on life-ing — loved ones were in the hospital, surgeries were had, autistic burnouts occurred. Like a baton in a relay race, responsibilities were passed on, deadlines shifted, and time slowed down wherever possible.

Appreciation

Congratulations to the artist fellows and appreciation for their powerful artwork. We are especially indebted to Allie Linn for their close attention to detail, their grace, and commitment to supporting the voices of all involved, artist, writer, and editor alike. Thanks to the writers for finding pause in the space of writing amidst the turbulence of government upheaval, intensive schedules, and other everyday challenges; Rachel Valinsky for the additional copy-editing; Team for working to make the web design more accessible; Descriptive Video Works for delightful audio tracks. Together we’ve made this offering for you readers — thanks for reading and endeavoring to evolve new worlds while also calling your reps.