04/16/2021
🧶Fabricating Networks🌐
“Many black communities throughout the United States have been what Davis calls ‘tool kits for racial discrimination’, cities systematically disregarded their needs, properties, and histories. In the mid-1960s, much of the Hill District, a predominantly Black and immigrant area in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania was cleared to make way for a new Civic Center, destroying over four hundred businesses and displacing more than eight thousand individuals from their homes. The Civic Center was eventually torn down, and today this ‘scar’ is a parking lot.
Rather than proposing a fix for this once bustling neighborhood, Davis uses computational textiles to make a symbolic responsive structure, a receiving antenna, or the Flower Antenna. Thirty-four industrially knitted cones embedded with pink copper yarns transmit the presence of electromagnetic waves via live sounds in this gallery. The ‘Black Flower’ serves to make visible and present the workings of an invisible urbanism that floats above the physical city supported and constructed by electromagnetic waves. These invisible waves are a new global ocean making it possible for people to connect through the internet. However, traversing this ocean in our everyday practices is as perilous as the Atlantic of the Middle Passage. The ‘Black Flower’ is a reminder of this other, invisible space that is also being constructed and needs attention for a more life valuing future.
