Kate Frances Lingard in conversation with Jazmin Morris, Alice Yuan Zhang and Rebecca Edwards
recording from 17 June 2021, online panel discussion

The conversation explored the use of technology as a form of collective care that utilises purposeful online and offline connections as well as collaboration to nurture digital well-being. Jazmin’s interest in this area lies in ideas surrounding access to technology and the voices heard (and unheard) in the industry. Alice spoke about distributed technology and its sharing and multi-location approach, and how organisation in digital space is an act of care in itself, as well as the importance of intimate experiences, and sustainability of care practices within this.

Kate chose four playing cards from the deck featured in the exhibition to use as visual prompts for the discussion. These were Trust(less), Entrance, (In)Visibility and Gift.

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Jazmin Morris is a Creative Computing Artist and Educator based in London. Her personal practise and research explore representation and inclusivity within technology. She uses free and open-source tools to create digital experiences that highlight issues surrounding gender, race and power; focusing on the complexities within simulating culture and identity.

Jazmin is a socially engaged artist, often collaborating with communities to provide workshops and tutorials, including our own Tech Yard – a club initiated to explore Creative Computing with young people based in Southwark.

As well as her roles at the CCI, Jazmin is the Lead Digital Tutor on the Graphic Communication Design course at Central Saint Martins. Jazmin has collaborated with various studios and institutions across Europe including; The Hague (KABK), Hyphen Labs, A Vibe Called Tech, Tate Modern, NEoN Digital Arts Festival, Institute of Coding, Stemettes and Hervisions.

https://www.instagram.com/princessjazmin_art

Alice Yuan Zhang 张元 is an artist, educator, and first-generation Chinese-American immigrant living on unceded Tongva, Chumash, Kizh land. Her practice explores socio-ecological entanglement through grassroots projects across mixed reality, browsers, networks, and other digital spaces, as well as somatic workshops and community exchanges. Zhang co-founded virtual care lab, an open experiment in remote togetherness and mutual governance. She is also a CultureHub resident artist, involved member of NAVEL Los Angeles, and adjunct professor of media design at Sarah Lawrence College.

https://aliceyuanzhang.com/ • https://www.instagram.com/aliceyuanzhang/

Kate Frances Lingard lives and works in Glasgow. At the moment, they are thinking about how to enact an ethics/politics of care within the digital commons. Working with digitally created images, objects, environments and playing around with programming, they hope to question systems that define how we act and live together. Recently, they have been working with friends and collaborators to discuss the possibilities and complexities of decentralised and distributed technologies as shared infrastructure.

Rebecca Edwards is the curator at arebyte Gallery.

The exhibition ‘tender spots in hard code’ comes from a desire to center and identify care as an essential category of value creation, and think of the tools and technologies that may allow or support this process. Care and its labor has been systematically undervalued, constrained by the distribution and management of economic resources. There can be a popular emphasis on care as an individual and solitary act and this renders out interdependence, such as neoliberal agendas like self-care over communal care. 

I wanted the exhibition to use understanding of care as a collective and structural practice not only for others but with others, questioning how care translates into digital technologies. The work began in the period of May 2020, and has been fundamentally shaped by the context of Covid-19, which has revealed the impact of years of neglecting care systems and the vulnerability that has been made evident. I’m gonna borrow from a text I read today by Ana Vujanović which sums this up nicely; now ‘nothing makes more sense than to revamp the social imaginary of our collective body. That body is in danger… It has to be taken care of. It should heal. And it can only heal collectively. At the same time, nothing seems less probable. The wounds that the virus and its long aftermath inflict don’t hurt everyone equally. Immunity is not built equally either. Care is administered unevenly.’ 

I hope to use the work to think about technology in relation to these ideas, to address exploitative processes that are replicated in digital space and how to break it down. To focus on tools that may hold hope for collective organisation in digital space (such as the possibilities and complexities of decentralised technologies) and for breaking down technologies that are historically gate kept or enclosed. I hope the cards can actively work against a digital dualism of the online vs. IRL dichotomy. This is why I am so excited to speak to Jazmin and Alice, as they both work to increase access and voices in digital discourse. 

The exhibition includes an adapted set of playing cards, using the standard suits to hold different meanings. The cards are all based around the narrative of a tired, fragmented body. In one variation of the game, the players join together as this collective body. This variation is set in a narrative where the player’s collective body is in a space of retreat from the systems that fragmented it, these are referred to as ‘fossilised systems’, giving the players choice as to what systems this may be referring to. Here, the cards are symbolic of pieces of this ‘body’, allowing the players to take time to consider if and how they may rebuild it. 

However, I thought in this session we could read 4 of the cards, using them as discursive tools / prompts to discuss some of the ideas threaded through them as I am eager to learn from both Alice and Jazmin’s experience and knowledge.

This video was made in conjunction with the exhibition tender spots in hard code by Kate Frances Lingard, featuring works by Rebecca Gill, Leo Robinson, Benjamin Hall and Seren Metcalfe, illustrations by Emelia Kerr Beale and essay by Colm Guo-Lin Peare

Opening from 11th June, 2021
Part of arebyte Gallery’s 2021 programme realities