Simone Browne’s book Black Artists and the Disruption of Surveillance will explore interventions made by artists whose works grapple with the surveillance of Black life, from policing and the carceral state to the FBI’s COINTELPRO and the digital realm. Each of the book’s chapters will explore some aspect of the mediums these artists use, among them plexiglass, glitter, Kanekalon synthetic hair, electronic waste, and the 3D-creation software Blender. Together these chapters will offer strategies of collaboration for our collective futures, distilling the productive possibilities of creative innovation when it comes to troubling surveillance and its various tactics.
Simone Browne is associate professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She teaches and researches surveillance studies, digital media, and Black studies. Her award-winning book Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Duke University Press, 2015) examines surveillance with a focus on transatlantic slavery, biometrics, airports, and creative texts. Browne is a member of the executive board of HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory); the advisory boards of APGT (A People’s Guide to Tech), EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center), and the US COVID Atlas project at the University of Chicago; and a member of Deep Lab, a feminist collaborative composed of artists, engineers, hackers, writers, and theorists. Browne is co-editor of Errantries, a book series on race and space published by Duke University Press.