Black Body Radiation: Rescripting Data Bodies is a collaborative art project by Ameera Kawash and Ama BE. It reimagines relationships between embodiment and datafication, interlinking live performance, AI-generated avatars, and body sensor networks to challenge dominant configurations of identity, data and commodification. Drawing from African masquerade and the concept of avatars, it integrates live performance and digital art to transform relationships between data, self, and commodity.
This project rethinks relationships between data and embodiment, exploring new ways to value and circulate performance artwork. It challenges data colonialism and digital practices based on exploitive relationships between data and self. Ameera Kawash designed a framework for capturing performer metrics and created AI-generated avatars that respond to Ama BE’s performance.
Black Body Radiation: Rescripting Data Bodies / Ama BE (GH/US), Ameera Kawash (PS/US), photo: Ameera Kawash and Ama BE
Black Body Radiation: Rescripting Data Bodies / Ama BE (GH/US), Ameera Kawash (PS/US), photo: Ameera Kawash and Ama BE
Using tobacco as a commodity and sacred material, Ama BE constructs a costume inspired by West African masquerades onto her body. She wears sensors tracking heart rate, body temperature, and blood oxygen levels. This data interacts with blockchain architectures, generating avatars that respond to her exertion and duration.The choreography and the avatars, as extensions of the self but also empty of it, serve as mediums through which labor, ritual and embodiment can be digitally reimagined. The digital architecture and art rescripts data bodies as agential forces arising from the physical expressions of the performance.
Bios
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Photo: Danielle TowersAma BE
GH/US
Ama BE is a Ghanaian/American artist exploring African relationships to land, labor, and migration. She explores materiality and memory, working largely with botanical materials that carry antithetical ties to hegemonic trade, violent labor migrations, spirituality and holistic remedies. Her work probes at the porous spaces between time, technology, and sentience to nuance experiences of encounter and open suggestive space for performing and embodying Africanfuturity.
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Ameera Kawash
US/PS
Dr Ameera Kawash (PS/IQ/US) is an interdisciplinary artist, journalist, and critical technologist. Her work reimagines the role of technology in art to address social justice, dismantle discriminatory and oppressive technologies, and innovate ecological practices. Currently, she is researching representational and epistemological justice while developing decolonial frameworks in the context of generative AI. She is Palestinian-Iraqi-American and earned a PhD from the Royal College of Art.
Credits
Digital Design, Gen AI art, Concept – Ameera Kawash
Performance Art and Design, Concept – Ama BE
Camera – Enrique Huaiquil
Presented in the context of the STARTS4Africa project. STARTS4Africa has received funding from the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No. LC-01960720.
