Black Data will bring the intellectual and political tools from queer of color critique—intersectionality and assemblage theory, an attention to embodiment and the aesthetics of everyday life—to address transformations in the politics of life and death in the early 21st century. Through case studies that include the work of artists Zach Blas, Kapwani Kiwanga, Simone Leigh, Jacolby Satterwhite, Mitch McEwan, DUOX, and others, the book will look to the ways artists respond to mass surveillance, big data, and informatic control.
Shaka McGlotten is Distinguished Associate Professor of Media, Society, and the Arts at Purchase College-SUNY. They are the author of Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality (SUNY Press, 2013). Their work aims to understand the arts in relation to cultural contexts, including the ways artworks interface with audiences in and outside of the contemporary art world or the academy. They also write about art’s pedagogical function, the ways it teaches how to feel and inhabit the world differently.