Co-opting the master’s tools: a black techno-intervention in mediated performance

Working paper

Can the instruments of domination yield reparative justice within the matrices of cultural representation and visual culture? To address this query, this paper will revisit the scholarly debate advanced by American writer and Black feminist, Audre Lorde, in The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House to consider the possibilities and, conversely, the limitations of co-option, an algorithmic tactic of resistance within artistic interventions into digital surveillance. Drawing from a lineage of cybernetic art, literature, and artistic theory, it will frame tools as politically mediated structures situated between diametrically opposed viewpoints: power and resistance. To support this assertion, it will examine my film Light Years Apart (2021-2025), an interactive mediated performance utilizing the body and AI-powered biometric technology to order information in time. Special attention will be given to its respective genealogy—I/Eye (1993) by Bill Spinhoven, The Dollie Clone Series (1995-1996) by Lynn Hershman Leeson, and The Interaction of Coloreds (2002) by artist duo Keith and Mendi Obadike—and the varying methods of negation employed by each artist to co-opt, resist, and subvert the intended design and function of digital surveillance. Finally, it will investigate the interplay of the body and technology within the cybernetics of interactive mediated performance, drawing a correlation between art made politically, conscious labor, and conceptual comprehension within the phenomenology of the creative exchange.

Authors: Neptune, C

• Publication status: Published
• Place of publication: Oxford
• Publication date: 2025-12-16
• Language: English
• Keywords: co-option; systems thinking; hot spot; cybernetics; cyborg; algorithmic resistance; fourth wall; the black gaze; play; aesthetic understanding; conceptual comprehension; and the creative exchange