[2.0] Salome Asega

on possession, speculation, and abolition

Divine Innovation covers the spiritual world of technology and those who shape it. It’s published once every three weeks, and is written by Adam Willems.

In How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, Alexander Chee discusses his evolving relationship with tarot cards. He once saw them as a tool that told him definitively what his future held, but Chee grows to appreciate tarot cards for what they really are.

“[They] show me the possibilities of the present,” he writes, “not the certainties of the future.”

Salome Asega’s work functions much like Chee’s tarot cards. She engages less in the act of fortune telling than in fortune invitation—offering more people the space to showcase what our shared future should hold, and to shape it.

A multimedia artist and an instructor in the Design and Technology program at Parsons School of Design, Salome engages in largely speculative work, and uses technology to push the bounds of what is possible. Her pieces are often the product of the collaborative workshop environments that she cultivates, in which participants suture together their experiences and politics to prototype artifacts from the future. That is, these pieces are crafted as objects from the “past” that are discovered in the future; they theorize where our future could be headed if political and social conditions move in more liberatory directions.

Take the Iyapo Repository, a resource library full of these artifacts from the future; the collection projects what the future holds for people of African descent. Below are the design and prototype of Artifact:046, “Afromation” pills that a person can ingest to receive the true, unbiased version of historical periods distorted in public narratives. The Civil Rights Movement is no longer coopted as an exemplar of moderate reform, but holds space as a radical political movement. Rock and roll is given its due as a Black artform. The transatlantic slave trade is recognized as a central, lasting component of US economic and social practices, making reparations a political inevitability.

Salome’s workshops provide access to technologies—3D printers, VR headsets, laser cutters—often inaccessible due to cost, especially to people of color. They speak to social issues and failures that exist today; they show the radical and deeply empathetic directions in which technology could be headed, especially when that technology is grounded in a collective understanding of the past and the future.

But some of Salome’s projects are also explicitly spiritual. P0SSESSI0N, for example, explores the connection between spiritual possession—in which a deity occupies a person’s body and speaks to them—and virtual reality. The first piece in the series takes users into the underwater fortress of Mami Wata, a water spirit central to many African religious traditions and those of the African diaspora. This work demonstrates that spirituality and technology can work in service to one another. They can even be the same thing.

The start of our conversation proves how Salome’s collaborative artistic practice is deeply connected to her own upbringing and ethics. Our discussion closes with a number of ways for readers to support Salome’s work and movements that she backs. In between, she speaks to the importance of speculation, including in the midst of current political mobilization, and stretches our understanding of technology’s scope and function in the process.

Divine Innovation: What catalyzed your interest and involvement in technology and tech-mediated art?

Salome Asega: When I think about how I got started in technology, I think of my uncles immediately. My family is Ethiopian, and a couple of my aunts and uncles left Ethiopia to pursue different academic opportunities. I was always supported by two uncles in particular to pursue some kind of career in technology. One of my uncles is a software engineer and programmer, and he got into that by developing his own games. He would send me floppy disks of games he was developing as a way to figure out the gaps in his own learning. And so for me, I was like, this is playful, this is storytelling, this is the kind of the work I want to do. It took me a long time to kind of come back to that. I went into more of a social practice, public practice. I was on that art track, but came back to technology in grad school and I feel like I really followed in my uncle's footsteps there.

DI: That's so cool. That sounds like such a lovely way to grow up, to be someone's guinea pig with their computer games.

SA: Yeah [laughs], totally. I mean we still have all those floppy disks, but none of the equipment to actually run it. I want to find a way to digitize or bring it up to speed.

DI: How do you define technology to begin with? That might be too broad of a question to answer in 50 words, but here we are.

SA: I mean technology to me is literally anything that is an extension of your human form. So any tool that you use to help you complete a task, maybe more efficiently or more creatively. Yeah, that's how I would define technology.

DI: It's interesting because I've had people be like, “yeah, technology is just anything that was invented after you were born—otherwise, it's just furniture or, you know, a utility.” But obviously that's not true, but it's definitely interesting that in our minds, there can be such a me-versus-this-thing kind of relation.

SA: That is interesting, I like the time-stamping of technology in that definition you just shared, because I've never thought about it in terms of time; I've just thought about it in terms of proximity to my body and what it helps me do.

DI: Your work is deeply collaborative and often commits to understanding/teaching the past. How do these two tendencies relate to each other, in your eyes?

SA: History is taught. And history is taught to us by people, right? So there is a centrism that is embedded in the story of our past when you receive it, so I think the reason why I really take this collaborative approach to thinking about the past, the present, and the future is because it brings those centrisms together. It brings them into the fold, and we can kind of begin to build a shared understanding, a shared language of how we are making sense of our history and what we want to see in the future. Like the history that I was taught growing up in Las Vegas is widely different than the history that my friends maybe grew up in New York learned. I mean there are major milestones that connect, but the way that the story was delivered is totally specific to context. So for me, it's so interesting to kind of begin to do that work of layering.

DI: Can you give an example of how history was presented to you differently in Las Vegas versus to people in New York?

SA: Yeah, I mean I think about the way the Underground Railroad is talked about where I grew up. There isn't a direct connection to any of the sites on the Underground Railroad. And so that becomes a one-day, one-class discussion. Whereas when you live in a place where there is deep land connection to this historic site, this trail, you see and you feel different about it. There's a deeper connection in the sense of like, this happened here.

DI: It seems then there's a moment in your collaborative work where you’re attempting to bring that rootedness together, and have that be personal and have people really empathizing with that history. 

SA: Totally, and so it just really expands, right? It helps you make stronger connections. The way that we're taught history is like a series of events. And we're not able to make the overarching connections between how these individual events build a narration of nation, of place, of people. And so when you bring people together to make the connections between these different events, you get a richer understanding of where we come from.

DI: As far as the political component goes, I thought it was interesting that some of the technologies that you had people crowdsource had very different politics behind them. Like the mask that neutralized a police officer’s ability to identify race [pictured above], which is not an abolitionist tool but reform-oriented. I was wondering how you resolve that, and move forward, or validate maybe someone having those politics. Or not, and challenging it.

SA: Yeah, definitely. I think a lot of that work happens in our workshops where we ask people why they think this artifact that they've designed could be a solution to a problem they see. So this person understood police brutality as a very, very violent challenge in the United States. And so as a response was like, “What if you know, this cop couldn't see race, couldn't see color?” In our workshops we’re like, “Ok that could be a solution, right, or a step to take, but what are all the wicked problems, the unintended consequences that come from that kind of technology?” And so we have to have a group conversation about what else that technology could trigger. Are there things we’re not accounting for, things we're looking over? And so that kind of stuff happens in the workshop, but I still think that the objects themselves are interesting in that they continue that conversation outside of the workshop into an exhibition or gallery space. In all of our shows when we exhibit these objects, original workshop documents are present. So you can get a sense of what this person was thinking when they designed this. It's their voice.

DI: So how do you generally structure your workshops?

SA: So our workshops usually happen in partnership with a community-led organization because they are on the ground working most directly with the communities they serve. And so we partner with them. We start our workshops with this card game where you're given a narrative card, a domain card, and an object card. They determine what kind of world you’re making your artifact for, and what kind of space it’s built for, like health or the arts. You're given these parameters, and then you draw your artifact and describe it and discuss it with the group. And then we move into a prototyping round, so at the same time that you were designing you’re also kind of figuring out how to make it.

DI: What turned this collaborative method into your artistic direction?

SA: I think I just really enjoy making with people, and these tools can be inaccessible to people. And so for me as someone who did an MFA program that had access to a lot of these things, and continued to teach in that program after I graduated, I wanted to leverage the access I have to bring all the exciting things I'm thinking about, and playing with, to people who look like me. Because that's who I actually want to do all this stuff with. I wanted to do this work with friends and people I am in community with, and mission-aligned organizations, and so I just was taking stuff out of out of where it's centered.

DI: What do you think technology and the speculative component of your work does in showing people what the future can hold?

SA: I think putting technology to the side for a second, I think that just having a speculative lens just brings you into this important space of radical imagination, right? And so even now in this contemporary moment, we’re seeing things that, for me, for the longest time, felt like I would never see become mainstream in my lifetime. So to hear people talk about abolition so centrally to this moment is my wildest dream—it's so many people's wildest dreams right now, you know? That over our family Zoom check in, we're talking about and learning about abolition. That's exciting! 

Abolitionist thinking incorporates the speculative. It's like, what is the world we want to live in, and then what are the incremental steps that we have to take to get there? What are the small revolutionary steps we can take to get to this greater vision? We're in that moment now and I'm just so excited. As difficult as everything is, it's like we have taken some giant steps in terms of narrative and what we can do together.

Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, these are people that I've been reading for for so long. They’ve been doing this work longer than I've been alive. To just see the things that they were fighting for and thinking about so central to this moment, we have to maintain the speculative lens on this. We have to maintain our dreams and our imaginations, and our dreams have to be central to how we move forward, you know? Because it's possible.

DI: It definitely validates the kind of art that you do that’s so collaborative and speculative. Does it put your art in new directions also, or is it too early to tell?

SA: I don't even know what any of this means for my personal making practice, because it just feels like I can't focus on anything besides being present for this. You know, I am having a really hard time making anything—I have no energy to do that right now. I don't know what working through this current moment looks like and what my art will look like after this, but I'm excited and I'm excited to be surprised. But right now I just want to get through this and just be super present. I'd like to think that I've been building a muscle in trying to get plugged in and learn from the best teachers. And so I’m just trying to continue that work.

DI: Last big question: Your work on Mami Wata [pictured above] involved such an interesting combination of technology and religion and spirituality. The three were visibly present there. I'd love to hear how you tried to reconcile or channel that spiritual element in how you presented that technologically.

SA: I think that spirituality in some ways serves as a type of technology. It’s something that exists beyond my human form and allows me to solve problems or address problems and challenges in creative ways and healing ways. Both just revolve around the human body in similar ways. So with Mami Wata, in the project P0SSESSI0N, I was thinking of the VR headset as a spirit that could mount a practitioner and bring you into this other realm. I was looking at a bunch of sculptural representations of spirit possession, and the way deities and Orisha possessed the practitioner is they mount the head and then drive you into their spiritual realm. It looked like putting on a VR headset and entering this new virtual realm. So I was just playing with that metaphor.

Even in the Iyapo Repository project, there are a lot of artifact submissions that brought in some spiritual quality. Technology has the ability to make something that feels really difficult or challenging possible. And spirituality can also do that. I would see that in a lot of the projects where people would create these things that felt only possible because there was some kind of spiritual factor at play. The seashell that plays music and sound by women across time and diaspora. It's so deeply spiritual for this artifact to be a seashell that’s on the coast line in the water and plays music. It just felt not of this earth. Well, we made a version of it!

DI: Most importantly, how can readers support your work and support causes that you're behind?

SA: I'm getting ready to launch a limited-edition print sale with Sun Night Editions, which is a West Oakland-based print shop in the Bay Area. We brought together ten Black artists, and the proceeds of this sale support the Transgender Law Center and People's Breakfast Oakland. So this is something that I'm working on right now with a group of cultural workers and artists and I'm really excited about that. 

POWRPLNT is a Bushwick-based digital art collaboratory, a space for collaborating with technology. This is a space that usually has after-school programs, but because of COVID has closed its doors for the most part, but is acting now as a sanctuary space to support protesters. So these are two things that I'm working on right now that I'm really excited about and would love for people to plug in if they can.