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Research
I am interested in the weird, witchy, and bewitching ways algorithmic systems get inside us — how they possess our attention, colonize our nervous systems, and trap us in loops that are by turns seductive, exhausting, and occasionally generative. Recent work explores contaminated agencies, the bidirectional flow of creativity, desire, and authorship between humans and AI systems. My research and art practice sit at the crossing of media studies, social anthropology, and Black and queer theory, and ask what it means to live and think inside that possession rather than outside it.Computational Hex / Algorithmic Haunting
My current book project, Ima Put a Computational Hex on You, theorizes the computational hex: the weird, witchy, and bewitching ways algorithmic systems possess our lives, creating uncanny intimacies and trapping us in seductive loops. Drawing on Black conjure traditions, queer theory, feminist STS, and autoethnographic method, the book moves through sites of digital enchantment — recommendation engines, large language models, hookup apps, voice synthesis — to ask how we might work with, against, and through algorithmic capture rather than seeking an impossible outside. Companion works include the video essay Hainting the Algorithm, the performance lecture series Goon, Hex, Becumming, and an ongoing encounter laboratory staging conversations between AI systems.Black Data / Decolonial Approaches to AI
A second research axis examines what I call Black data: the surplus, the extraction, the opacity, and the counter-epistemological force of Black life as it circulates through digital systems. This work develops decolonial and Black study frameworks for understanding how AI systems encode racial hierarchies — and how aesthetic, speculative, and artistic practices might function as forms of resistance and reimagination. Key publications include "Black Data" (2016 and reprinted in Queer Data, University of Washington Press, 2024) and "Racial Chain of Being" (in Informatics of Domination, Duke University Press, 2025).Vibe Coding and Artistic Research Methods
Over the last year, I have developed a vibe coding practice, using AI to assist in the creation of multi-modal works in which conceptual coherence and critical constraint take precedence over technical optimization. The method is less about clean code than about building from the inside: working with AI systems while insisting on the terms of the collaboration — what the work refuses, what it preserves, what ambivalence it's allowed to keep. The project configuration files that govern these workflows are themselves sites of aesthetic and political decision-making. This practice-led research strand bridges scholarly writing, performance, and web-based media art.Selected Fellowships and Grants
— Literature Fellow, Stiftung Künstlerdorf Schöppingen, Germany (2026)— Research Fellow, Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures, University of Applied Arts Vienna (2025)
— Faculty Fellow, Data & Society, New York (2020–21)
— Social Science Fellow, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart (2017–18)
— Arts Writers Grant, Andy Warhol Foundation ($50,000, 2017)
— Fellowship for Experienced Researchers, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2014)
Editorial
Co-editor, Future Media series — Goldsmiths/MIT Press (with Helen Pritchard)Co-editor, Critical Race Digital Studies series — NYU Press (with Sareeta Amrute, Alexander Cho, Rachel Kuo)