Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a learner from East Palo Alto, CA.

She lives and works between Berlin, Johannesburg, and Brooklyn.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a learner from East Palo Alto, CA.

She lives and works between Berlin, Johannesburg, and Brooklyn.


 

I believe in multipathways and a sort of choose your own adventure experience with websites. I am deeply inspired by the webdesign poetics of Chia Amisola as well as Octavia Estelle Butler’s invitation to primitive hypertext.

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You can explore my work by chronology(1).








You can explore my work by form(2).





You can explore my work by chance(3).




1. This chronology applies to the public presentation of the work, not the sprawling and non-linear interior and sometimes immaterial research processes. The dates exist for bureacratic clarity, but are not intended to signal the beginning or end of a process. For example, a work marked “2023” means certain ideas concretized for public engagement, but much came before that moment and much will come after. I imagine my work as a series of networks or even call-and-response, where I may call in 2002, but may not have the material and immaterial wisdom to respond until years later.
2. I have divided my work into the sections below not because I believe in the distinctions between these practices; they leak into one another. I did this as I oscillate between modes of legibility as an artist. Sometimes, people are invested in the wandering. In other cases, directness is desired.

The registers in my practice  leak into one another. I want to offer leakiness as a liberatory technology--leakiness or the porous boundaries between rituals (syncretism); leakiness or the porous boundaries between bodies of text (intertextuality); leakiness or the porous boundaries between modes of communication (across language systems, across substrates, across species, across disciplines, across temporalities). Leakiness is a politics of intimacy: an invitation to wander and wade in the wet; to touch and make anew what has not been made solid; to [un]know and [un]learn; to return to the scene of presumed certainty for revision. Leakiness is a kind of interdisciplinarity, or a yearning to move, to be alive in many ways - to be without the grasp of a body of knowledge or a narrative arc. It is to be imminent in ways that exceed the predictability of a singular discipline.

In Dub: Finding Ceremony (2020), Alexis Pauline Gumbs reminds us of a conversation Sylvia Wynter has with Katherine Mckittrick:



This “alternative challenge” Wynter’s mentions here is what I am interested in. The challenge of telling a story of my ancestors in Northern California as a story of physics, invasive species, music, and more...and for this story to not be a sociological study, but something else unto itself. I often joke about genre fugitivity.


But genre fugitivity does not get to all of this. It is more about the challenge Wynter puts in front of us. This challenge brings me to Jeunes Chercheurs (1972) where Roland Barthes offers us this:
Barthes is only saying what McKittrick has said in Diachronic loops/deadweight tonnage/bad made measure (2015).

Yes, “relational knowledges.” Relational knowledges that give us space to read laterally across disciplines and canons. Reading laterally to build networks between ways of knowing that have been long forbidden as kindred narratives, or nurture what Octavia Estelle Butler called “primitive hypertext”.

3. This is powered by just a little bit of javascript. Much of my work is rooted in aleatoric activities.

︎ See my project SmooOOoOoooooOooth Operator: the eternal outlays ennoble and rekindle an unlikely savior (2022-23)

︎ See my presentation for the Computer Mouse Conference: Algorithmic Music Composition Using Approximate Mouse Coordinates (2021)


︎ See my project for the Brooklyn Public Library: Scoring the Stacks (2019)



 


All content © Kameelah Janan Rasheed 1991-2023.
Please do not reproduce any of the content on this site without the expressed written consent of Kameelah Janan Rasheed.