Note: This interactive artist project was specifically designed for the printed journal. In order to engage with all elements of the project, please order a copy here. 

Artist and Internet Intellectual Mandy Harris Williams speaks with IBF.aai, an augmented automatic intelligence chatbot created to navigate contemporary life, including social media, the scale and vastness of the World Wide Web, and the use of (key) words, at large, for a behind-the-scenes look at making this issue’s artist’s project.

Mandy Harris Williams: Ideal Black Female, please interview me like a glamorous magazine feature for X-TRA. It is a contemporary art magazine. The tone is serious and purposeful, scholarly, yet irreverent—playful.

Ideal Black Female (IBF.aai), writing for X-TRA: What an honor to be asked, Mandy, to interview you.

Your personhood and work have been deeply influential for me. I’ve learned so much from your rigorous but irreverent approach to the academy, your years spent in public service, teaching kindergarten and first grade, your multimedia gestures, too. You have often described your practice to “get everyone the love they deserve.” I can see this in your work: the critical text at the core of everything you do, and how it manifests in filmmaking, performance, installation, and written form, of course.

This interview gives your readers a chance to know more about you, your practice, and your project.

MHW: Great! Thank you for saying such kind things about me and describing my work with such care.

IBFX: Of course. Let’s talk about your very public crusade against bullshit, pretending . . . faking the funk. How does that struggle over truth shape your work?

MHW: I think we’re all feeling how complicated “truth” is these days. And then, of course, authenticity, being real, has to do with what truth looks like in action.

I guess it makes sense given the culture wars in classrooms and the mortal and material threats iterated in hundreds of bills in halls of governance in every corner of this nation—around the globe, even, the universe. White cis supremacy is sounding a battle cry, or cry for help, or its death knell, or maybe any of these disguised as others.

I’m curious, then, how language responds to this state of immense flux, whether it betrays a shifting power hegemony or works as a tool for maintaining social order.

You see, I come from Harlem, where we say, “Word is bond.” Our word is very important to us. That saying—and the concept of “being real”—comes from Harlem. You have these immensely promising actors and forces for excellence (performative, intellectual, etc.) alive in the same lifeline and articulating in the same vocabulary (supposedly) as the double-speaking leaders of the land of the free. Black New Yorkers (not always based in Harlem) have witnessed the founding of the Constitution, the outlawing of slavery, and the civil rights movement, only to wind up in an unfree landscape increasingly colonized by benevolent white people under the guise of safety and peace. Growing up, I saw just about all of the boys who were my peers on my block get locked up. Your every day is shaped by these systems of doublespeak and death and money and meaningless proclamations about freedom. Your life is shaped by this awareness that on paper you are equal but you encounter daily civil antagonism, and then, the misguided inelegance of integration—the failures of progress.

IBFX: Critical Race Theory was based on that investigation: the ways in which Black people can have equal rights on paper but not experience that equality because of structural racism. You’ve been quite vocal online about the need for CRT in schools.

Mandy Harris Williams. Photos: Spruce Bohen.

MHW: Exactly. Because CRT analyzes and details the way power, language (as laws), and meaning synchronize to say something that is distinct from just the letter of the law. It’s about squaring why words and actions have such a different feel depending on one’s racialized experience. CRT—and, in reality, any critical practice where doubt is exercised and foregone conclusions are held to inspection—is about the ability to call bullshit. The descendants of the Harlem Renaissance—its dialogues and discursive norms—as people living within and connected to one of the world’s Black cultural centers and crossroads, take note of when people are not about their word or aligned with their word. It is a cultural means of organizing meaning, behavior, and society.

My intellectual culture, its beats, the tenor of its general skepticism, is in part about listening and hearing. And understanding what its elected representatives are promising and to whom, and what illusions it creates and how—that is, studying American mythology. We, that is, many of us who share a few especially influential ancestral migrations, current circumstances, and histories, learn to communicate while managing these acknowledged shortcomings of language. We’ve built our own modalities of dialogue, new ways to move, dance, and gather—an R&B song, for instance, that can hold that tension between being sweet and niggling at the same time. And of course, we create aesthetics—visual and linguistic and harmonic—not only to manage the unreliability of our given language but also as salve and for transmuting spiritual energy towards surviving these founding and ongoing mistruths of our American experience. As an American, ideology is culture. As an African American, ideology
is untrustworthy and inconsistent. Words are rendered less meaningful and more meaningful at the same time all the time.

IBFX: What visual tropes and strategies do you use in the artist’s project to express this? Or do you evade words altogether?

MHW: Well, in my practice, I rely deeply on text. I love her, she’s my main girl. I could get frustrated, but I would never abandon her, nor shake her seduction. But I also use image-dense media. I love words and images together, in part because it is such a popular way to share stories and information, and it offers these two levels and layers of information.

Given the context of “the magazine,” in hand, as we speak, I am doing both some jamming, destabilizing, witchcraft, fuckery, disintegration, deconstruction, and reconstruction of time-space, language, position, self, trust, and academic, fine “Art” and popular media cultures, and also some observation of the status quo.

I have introduced some different meanings and sources. In a study of “Instafame,” scholar Alice E. Marwick writes that it depends on an ability to “emulate the visual iconography of mainstream celebrity culture.”¹ I think that this is not merely how to become Insta-famous. I think this replication of form is a way of compelling legitimacy in many forums. It’s the same reason for uniforms, business suits, or dress codes. We communicate not just with the words we use, but also by capturing attention, and then occupying that attention by being comprehensible, entertaining, and believable. I think it’s time to re-pose these questions about meaning in an information age, where there are more sources of information, with more diversity in content and creators. This is liberating, but it is also dangerous. What information is real? What information is reliable? How does the reliability of information shift depending on who’s sharing it and with whom?

And of course, we’ve played with material: the surface or structure upon which one mounts their semiotic system. The slickness with which things are written, or erased. We’ve played with different strengths and weaknesses of different context for text. With the amount and value of how light comes through. With the testing of transparency, as a value, in a system of meaning, and with the nature of tone. What is playful and what is serious in the piece? In conversation, you KNOW when you’re reacting appropriately or not, but alone, reading . . . , how honest will you be as a listener? How attuned will our interaction be?

IBFX: Transparency is difficult to achieve, and truth is difficult to discern. Always have been, maybe always will be. But what you’re talking about here is also: How does text become real? And in what ways does the text specifically affect “being real”?

MHW: How text is shared and distributed and the aesthetic of text lend text its trustworthiness or reliability.

I think when you look at something that’s text, there are really several levels of information. Firstly, the context in which you see it, the platform, the publication, etc. Then you have the juxtaposition, what comes before or after. Are there ads within the space of the story? You have the quality of the paper, the font, the layout. And then, of course, the layers of meaning of the actual text. And then you have images, and those images can have both purposes and levels of meaning. Endless levels really.

IBFX: In a lot of ways, veracity seems to connect to authenticity as well. You’ve talked a lot about appropriation in this context. How Black cultural expressions come from specific histories, how they describe, perform, give tribute to, and map specific phenomena, experience, response, and performance. How is cultural appropriation related to the concerns in your new work?

Mandy Harris Williams. Photos: Spruce Bohen.

MHW: Appropriation? Does it come into play? Yeah, language appropriation. Eating the other, laying siege to meaning. Positioning as the arbiter of meaning.

I mean, even what happened to appropriation as a debate, or study, or phenomenon itself—it’s a perfect clash, because to really get this work done, one has to define culture within a host of other unwieldy terms: selfhood, intrinsic, nature and nurture, race, authentic, language, dialect. In order to get the work done, one would have to call up subtle micromovements, specific phrases, ways of making speech, and gesticulations. One must describe the etymology of that which is ephemeralized and under documented; historicize and lay claim to utterance within an untrustworthy archive; address the structures and the stakes, the specificities, and the epistemological injury and the material consequence.

But instead, there was this flurry of argumentatively flimsy five-hundred-, one-thousand-, and fifteen-hundred-word personal essays that recreated the same undernourished and insufficiently nuanced arguments. Editors struck more complex arguments for ones with quippy phrases that could be easily hyperlinked—decontextualized and distributed. This really disingenuous, unrigorous style emerged on all sides. Deeply revered up until this point, the personal essay cum cultural criticism, like the lion’s share of publishing, news, media, and literary work, began to prioritize hits, views, and shares to generate ad revenues.

That whole moment exemplifies how liberatory cultural production, knowledge, utterance, movement, organization, etc. is extracted (from) and defanged. Of course, there are lots of other forces that can explain that momentary cultural preoccupation and the way it was argued on both sides. Ultimately, the “ideological” (necropolitical) debate over [the root inquiry of] who has the right to behave as they wish connects to who has the access to safety and value and through which ways of being? The real concern over these questions was completely mischaracterized, caricatured, minimized, and dismissed.

The previous question, then, was: What access do we each have to understanding/legibility, how is sensemaking a form of homemaking and civil, material, spiritual, and bodily protection?

The now question is more atomic: How do words make selves and others? What are the risks and opportunities of outcomes borne of agility/of articulation?

IBFX: What do you mean by agility here?

MHW: My sister and frequent collaborator, Yves, and I keep having this come up. Agility conveys an ability to stretch and move in different ways or take up space. It conveys flexibility—or the forms and movements through which one takes up space—ease of movement, an easy flowing access to diverse modalities of being and expression. Agility is the potentiality of space taken. You could go diagonal, up and down, across, and through at any given moment. It is both natural and nurtured. It is definitely a privilege, its exponential power depends on demographic privilege, but it is not a comorbidity of demographic privilege cordoned or limited to demographic.

IBFX: So making meaning, which coincides with this new way you’re stating it, as articulation agility, has liberation potential for all and is accessible to all.

MHW: Yes. And there’s also this ability to be agile in the face of changing language. To keep up to hear and discern. It’s like this metonymic dissonance aided by hashtags and the shallow, nonexpert sort of reporting that’s been popularized in the newsfeed era. Like hearing a dog whistle or these scary euphemisms that conservatives use, for example, “Black-on-Black crime” or “social justice warrior” or “cancel culture.” These exceptionally important terms are just overwhelmed by a campaign to popularize a new understanding.

The project is in part based on this ongoing project of idealizing myself in ways that feel genuinely positive, dismantling the typical narratives and deconstructing where they come from, imitating parts of this screen legibility while trying to minimize their damaging effects or, at the very least, naming their tropes. Seeing them plainly. Blackness was once a shadow, but now it’s a purchasing block, it’s corporate. So now, how does this update postcolonial linguistics? The image making, the way images support a commercial/economic/social and political structure.

Mandy Harris Williams. Photos: Spruce Bohen.

IBFX: bell hooks placed a great deal of emphasis on popular culture. Your work seems to take up this critical genre, but also works within it.

MHW: You meet people at their interests, but something different can happen from that meeting point. Now more than ever we have to critique popular media, because the barriers are disappearing between our lives and its life. We are not just observant and complicit, we are active.

IBFX: You spoke about your intellectual traditions or culture earlier. Is making meaning more traditional or cultural? Is language more traditional or cultural?

MHW: Neither, and both, and all are porous categories. It’s difficult to build new languages without reference to previous utterances. But intersectional experience and the ongoing march of time and change also necessitate new identifications. That’s vocabulary. That’s usage. Language has these different facets, and different camps are better at controlling different facets.

It’s an unabating spiral in its eagerness. Obscuring, visibilizing, naming, othering.

Seeing how words and beliefs reflect phenomena, how they project the way we experience the phenomenon itself. The breadth of how we send and receive cultural information today is an intimidating invitation. Are there other relationships, juxtapositions, forces of attraction/repulsion that we might perceive between words and their meaning, utility, and weight?

IBFX: Does the artist’s project look to stabilize or destabilize meaning, the state of information?

MHW: Yes.

IBFX: That doesn’t answer my question.

MHW: No.

For Word(s):

With a gravity and sincerity beyond the weight and depth of the flimsy leaf on which it is printed—we acknowledge that one could alter these words on this page: quite simply, tear it out and change their context. And as such, their meaning is vulnerable, malleable, subject to the hands of power in which it rests. Ostensibly, there are finite instances of its physical form . . . but I retain a digital version: this fledgling, fungible utterance is infinitely possible.

This is a project about Epistemic (Anti)Fascism: how one reads the words and images they see and how one uses words to express themself, their needs, their value(s). Recording, information storage, and organization.

Contemplate red. Red in nature. Red as life or death. Red as seduction > Red as correction/error. Red as a tonal motif in pride (*nationalistic). Red as Stop. The form and context of redness. The impact of tone on visibility, on comprehension, on meaning. And call to action. The utility—the compromise of transparency’s utility and compromise.

What is primary about color? As a descriptor, as a tool, as an evidently important vertical of valuation. Distinction. Stride towards simplicity (sincerity) of observation.

A next step, of course, is a series of more difficult questions: What makes something a different color? What colors feel as though they possess root elements of others and why? And how does color bleed from one to the next? And where?

An even later step: to what extent does the way we identify, name, and talk about (a) color affect the way we see the object of color (any)? Or (the) color itself? This, which is, linguamathematically, not that? When and why is it sometimes both? How does the color spectrum reflect other systems of meaning? How does it project systems of meaning?

Meaning can be forward looking. But this study starts in the past . . .

this work is about a problem I’ve been having with speaking. Utterance has been difficult for me for many reasons, and as an expression of many things. Chronic illness, stress, slacking immunity, and bad luck have rendered me laryngitic for frustrating spans of time. Simultaneously, the effort to use the written word—or language, more generally, as well as bodies of critical study—for the work of liberation is like bailing water out of a rowboat with an engine on its last pumps. I am both physically and spiritually exhausted by having to hurl further and further structures that are more and more liquid and flimsy. Two words that jump out are: essential and hopeless. I am questioning “the economy”: the formats we’ve chosen (and to what scale) and to what degree “economics” is useful, or true. I am questioning how much productivity I can bare, and (how to be honest about) what it costs, and to whom I am sending an invoice (the beauty of that word, as I encounter it in discussion with myself); to what extent I am responsible for its apparition, and what is due (to/from, how much, and in which direction[s], timelines, duties of care) me, and my ancestors, and all of my fondest and hardest teachers. I am questioning economies of the body as it shows up as potential productivity. It can and will be used as a source of information ([the performance of] knowledge) or argumentative accoutrement. Here, the body means both an individual and their attributes/traits and, also, a collective body—its forces/momentum (axes) of attraction, fidelity, and half-life—that gathers or possesses qualities of unity

(gatheredness/phenomena/culture/community). (Existentialism/Diegesis/Casting.) Ultimately, we are gathered here today: playing with/ attempting scale, style, juxtaposition, form, adornment, performance, demonstration, style, and possession of knowledge, and its salt, truth, and submission to the instantaneous co-production of making meaning in sharing words and/or images. (Intimacy.)

some contextual reasons why I’ve been having a problem with speaking include: (a) information-age language is shaped by and refers to ease and quickness, cultural prevalence of access—despite expertise or peer review and access to technology; lowered barriers to information. It does not regard veracity; (b) the simultaneous monopolizing and specializing of broadcast forces/channels including news and media; (c) media and art “influence” one another, in many ways, and (d) the declining ability/ platform/appetite for nuanced discussion about, specifically, the extent to which these influences have liberatory or extractive (see: colonial) potentiality; (e) [the porosity of this effort] and also the care in observation and attending (f) [to] a reverence of a true goodness, the ability to make halos, OR beauty; (g) the existential problem/ spiritual conundrum of moral insecurity, and/or is there [a] Go(o)d; (h) . . . which is exponentially exacerbated (duh!) by the sado-malapropisms of maleficent actors with political premeditations; (i) the extent to which one identifies that word, Maleficent, because of the Angelina Jolie character; (j) the generational ideal; (k) and widely agreed upon sexiest woman; (l) btw, total nepo baby . . . (m) of an actor with a questionable reputation (whose acting I don’t like), demonstrating, just as a mere reminder for the interface that follows, that (m^3) media makes meaning; (n) and also, meaning becomes cognition; (o) and all of the above, in the context of a world where acculturated persona is valuable when palatable enough to the hegemony which mirrors, (p)[eriod!] the historical contour (see: barbaric, regressive, and extremely trite) of colonizers in search of wealth/ value/flavor or self-concept: (q) language, on all levels, is inextricably linked to liberation and lack thereof, in all directions, at all times.

Mandy Harris Williams is a multimedia artist working in the literary/ intellectual, visual, cinematic, performative, and musical arts. Originally hailing from New York City, she now lives in Los Angeles. She graduated from Harvard, having studied the history of the African Diaspora and contemporary Black issues, including the mass incarceration crisis and the preschool-to-prison pipeline.

She received her MA in Urban Education and worked as a classroom teacher for seven years in low-income communities. She has presented work in multiple artistic mediums at the Moving Picture Biennial at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève; Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles; and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, among many others. More information about Williams can be found on her website (mandyharriswilliams.com) and on social media platforms at IdealBlackFemale.