Looking at the digital–cultural–political means of resistance and media activism on the Internet, this article explores Internet art practices in South Africa as a manifestation of cultural dissent towards western hegemony online. Confronting the unilateral flow of online information, Afro Cyber Resistance is a socially engaged gesture aiming to challenge the representation of the African body and culture through online project. Talking as examples the WikiAfrica project, Cuss Group’s intervention Video Party 4 (VP4) and VIRUS SS 16 by artiste Bogosi (...) Sekhukhuni, this article attempts to demonstrate that the use of the Internet as a medium for digital cultural production and as a platform of dissemination is crucial to raise social awareness and defy African stereotypes and misrepresentation. Creating a unique visual language using the ‘global’ aesthetics of the Internet, yet rooted in African culture, these works deeply reflect on the social environment they spawn from and therefore act as cultural and visual resistance. (shrink)

Much more than their machinic reality, current iterations of AI rely on imagined divisions of human and non-human properties and skills that have genealogical ties to colonization. For this reason, research efforts have recently been made to historicize these imaginaries, connecting them to colonial ideals that delegate black and brown colonized people into the realm of the non-human. Atanasoski and Vora (Surrogate humanity. Race, robots and the politics of technological futures, Duke, Durham and London, 2019) have called this a “surrogate (...) humanity”, where narratives of autonomous technologies function to disappear precisely the formerly colonized peoples that are enveloped in its production process. At the same time, the gendered and racialized roots of this maternal figure represents an opportunity to uncover and critique the invisibilization of embodied resources necessary to produce AI, precarious bodies labouring to produce algorithmic infrastructures in a manner that can be considered in a genealogy of carework and reproduction. These genealogies complicate the detachment suggested by the surrogate figure and go beyond it to proclaim a more generative function of the relationship between the black maternal figure and AI. The article analyses Tabita Rezaire’s multi-media artwork Sugar Walls Teardom to think through decolonial and queer renderings of the black female bodies upon which technological imaginaries rest, to extend beyond AI surrogacy and towards notions of kinship, care and world-making by producing an AI aesthetics that is relational, embodied, and celebratory of other ways of liveness. (shrink)