Light and Cold Conversation - Atlantic, Algorithmic and Visibility

At the end of the last century, Detroit music producer team Drexciya fictionalized the underwater race Drexciyans, believed to be the descendants of "thousands of pregnant African slaves who were thrown into the water along with dangerous cargo due to illness on a ship bound for the United States" and eventually acquired the ability to live under the sea.

This film references and expands this imagination, envisioning a future of technological advancement supported by artificial intelligence. Here, Drexciyans and artificial intelligence re-examine the recent history of mankind and once again refer to the political economy and the politics of representation in digital infrastructure and images circulation.

AI assists in the more efficient exploitation of resources while using them to meet the expanding infrastructure (computer clusters, storage devices, cloud computing devices, etc.) behind which planetary resource consumption, unfair African digital labor, and loud noise are deliberately hidden, continuing to shape the transparent and sanitized public image of computing technology. On the other hand, the way the sensor samples and the circulation of the image bring noise, and the compression algorithm determines the "blackness" part of the sacrifice is greater, the lack of more information, more distortion.

In Africa, many black workers are being subjected to low wages and great emotional exploitation, removing sensitive, violent and illegal elements from AI algorithms. However, until it was exposed by the white Western media, no one mentioned this part of the group. These black laborers, like those black infrastructure, have their faces and voices deliberately hidden in order to satisfy the pure and transparent imagination of artificial intelligence (this description with clearly fascist characteristics).

Further, Drexciyans questions the contemporary human definition of "representation," which makes clear and unambiguous images more popular and unambiguous images aesthetically and morally disadvantageous. The contemporary image world excludes the representation of black people in the name of technology, on the one hand, the backwardness of the film production and projection system on the African continent, and on the other hand, the shooting technology has been aimed at white people from the beginning, and has failed to solve the problem of black identification. Drexciyans suspects that the Western film festival system has played a role. For a long time, these festivals have disparaged images of black Africa and directors from black Africa in terms of visibility. The guests on the red carpet are always noble white people. AI seems to be able to produce scripts about black Africans, but in various ways it deepens the exploitation of black Africans, and fundamentally, AI only takes blacks to the opposite of high-profile film festivals: transparency.