Abstract
In her 2016 book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Christina Sharpe describes the archive as "invention," drawing attention to the responsibility of archivists in selecting and preserving stories as well as viewers of the archive in the ways they engage with these materials. This project explores 'the archive as invention' by centering the stories of women who have transformed sneaker culture and industry. The first purpose of this project is to archive these artifacts which exemplify what I describe as Black Feminist technologies -- those technologies which repair rather than destroy, liberate rather than confine, and disrupt rather than conform. In creating this archive I attempt to engage in what Caswell and Cifor (2016) describe as "radical empathy," a feminist ethic of care that subverts the status quo in archival practice. I consider the reindigenization of digital archiving technologies -- through the framework of Neema Githere's 'afropresentism' -- as a means of practicing radical empathy in archival work. The first phase of my project examines the process of archiving. I explore the presence of Blackness in the archive, reflecting on how my use of emerging technologies such as 3D scanning and modeling in combination with live-streaming and social networking radically cares for sacred artifacts and the revolutionary women who produced them.
Introduction
Archives found me - Steven G. Fullwood
I inherited my first Air Jordans, the 13 'Bred', from my older cousin who had grown out of her pair and passed them down to me. Originally released in 1998, the Air Jordan 'Bred' are the 13th release from NBA legend Michael Jordan’s signature sneaker line with Nike. I cherished the shoes because I understood their cultural significance, even at a young age. A few years had passed since the initial release of the Air Jordan 'Bred', so any time I wore them I received comments about how lucky I was to have the originals, to not have to anxiously await their next release which would not be until 2004. While Jordans had been established as one of the most coveted sneaker lines of the 90s and early 2000s, I had no idea that another significant movement in the sneaker industry and subculture was also underway at the time. In 1996, Sheryl Swoopes debuted her signature sneaker, the Nike Air Swoopes, at the Olympic Summer Games. Swoopes gained Nike’s attention through her success as a college athlete at Texas Tech, where she led her team to win the 1993 NCAA championship. Although there was a professional women’s basketball league at the time (The Women’s Professional Basketball League), a sneaker designed specifically for women basketball players had yet to be created. The Reebok Freestyle, released in 1982, was the first sneaker designed and marketed specifically for women; however, the absence of women’s basketball shoes was a glaring display of the sneaker industry’s bias toward male consumers. Thus, the release of the Nike Air Swoopes was revolutionary for women athletes and sneaker lovers alike. The first player to be signed to the WNBA, as a Black woman and mother (Swoopes gave birth to her son during the WNBA’s first season in 1997), Swoopes represented those who had historically been excluded from industries like that of professional sports or sneakers. Each pair of her signature shoes carry cultural memory risking endangerment if not preserved.
When I learned about the Air Swoopes nearly 18 years after acquiring my first pair of Jordan’s, I was immediately compelled to share the story of Swoopes and her signature sneakers in connection with my studies of media and technology. I began to interrogate the shoes as technological artifacts, mobile technologies that produce space and place for black women. I realized that sneakers were not the only tools with creative and liberating potential, leading me to the term ‘Black feminist technologies,’ which I use to describe technologies which repair rather than destroy, liberate rather than confine, and disrupt rather than conform. As Black feminist technologies, the Air Swoopes repair histories that attempt to obscure Black women’s contributions to technology, liberate sneakers from the confines of masculinist sneaker culture, and disrupt the systems seeking to control the ways black women move. My ultimate goal for this project is to produce a virtual museum that allows visitors to explore the history of Black feminist technologies, which I further describe as tools of subversion developed from the application of Black women’s scientific knowledge. I envision this project as an immersive virtual reality experience that shines light on Black women as technologists by bringing their contributions from margin to center.
I began with a series of steps; first, deciding which artifacts to include in the museum. Due to my love for sneakers and the previous work I had begun in studying them, I decided to preserve sneakers, specifically those designed by or for Black or other racialized women. Second, I needed to determine how and where to locate these artifacts. Initially, I considered locating digital images of the sneakers and showcasing them on a standalone website; however, after reading the introduction to Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life, I learned about NeuroSpeculative Afrofeminism, a digital narrative developed by hyphen labs, and I was inspired to create a similar virtual reality experience that would center on the sneakers and their stories. I learned that virtual reality environments were created through 3D modeling and scanning. Then, I met with an NCSU special collections librarian who provided me with tools and resources to navigate digital archives where I could find potential artifacts. Unable to locate any collections featuring the black feminist technologies I was searching for, I discovered that I already owned the artifacts I sought to preserve. In my personal collection, I have a pair of sneakers designed by Melody Ehsani, an LA-based entrepreneur and designer of Iranian descent. I had also purchased a pair of Nike Air Tuned Swoopes when I learned about them in the spring of 2022. There is not much information published online about the Air Tuned Swoopes, drawing attention to their rarity and the danger involved in not archiving them. I realized in that moment of deciding to preserve the very items I owned that "archives found me" (“Memory Work as Care Work,” 2022).
Radical Empathy in the Archives
Care is the antidote to violence — Saidiya Hartman
In "Memory Work as Care Work," Zakiya Collier along with fellow archivists Amy Salls and Steven G. Fullwood, reflect on the ways care shows up in Black archival practice. They discuss the use of digital media and technology to archive Black histories, making them more accessible to Black communities. This use of technology is echoed by The Black Archiving Project, who explain that “for Black communities, digital archives can transform how we document our history, and make it accessible for Black communities to see, hear and experience our history from our perspectives and lived experiences'' (Black Digital Archiving, n.d.). Digital technologies offer a way for those without formal education or experience in the archive to contribute to historical narratives. Someone like me, who started this project with little understanding of archival work, can speculate and build a digital archive centering the stories of my culture and community. After several months of studying and learning more about archival work, I understand that to engage in it entails a significant amount of responsibility, especially when dealing with the stories of underrepresented groups which is why some archivists describe themselves as memory workers, drawing attention to the cultural memories embedded within each story and artifact being preserved. Black cultural memory work is a collaborative effort accomplished through the interaction between human and non-human actors. Our ancestors engaged with each other and whatever technologies were available — from oral storytelling and song, to cameras and tape recorders — preserving sacred stories and artifacts. A grandmother’s recipe written on a sheet of paper, an infant’s blanket, a pair of sneakers, each of these items are imbued with the stories of their creators and, or subjects.
Theaster Gates posed the following question at a 2016 exhibition, asking: “Who is responsible for the failure of care around legacies of the black people around the world?” This is a persisting concern among archivists who have adopted an ethics of care into their work. Considering the archive as an “invention,” (Sharpe, 2016), its failure to ethically preserve stories of marginalized groups, particularly those of racialized women, is one display of what Ruha Benjamin (2019) defines as discriminatory design. Though Benjamin uses this phrase to explain the coding of racial biases into commonplace technologies such as park benches, cameras, and search engines, it may be extended to our understanding of spaces like the formal archive, especially in an era where digital technologies are a primary means of preserving and accessing knowledge. Beyond simply saving underrepresented stories is the need to archive them in ways that make them accessible to the communities from which they derive. As archivist Bergis Jules (2016) maintains, “for digital collections, who gets represented is closely tied to who writes the software, who builds the tools, who produces the technical standards, and who provides the funding or other resources for that work.” Archives preserve memory. To be invisibilized from the archive, to have one’s access to it rejected, are forms of violence that adhere to the systems of power and domination imposed upon everyday life.
In their conversation, Salls, Collier, and Fullwood call for archivists to challenge the cold and detached violence of the archive by breathing warmth and emotion into their work. They explain the importance of care in archival work. Archivists Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor (2016) also take this stance, defining this sort of care as radical empathy, contending that a feminist ethics of care will “transform the reading room space from a cold, elitist, institutional environment to an affective, user-oriented, community-centred service space” (p. 24). What makes their proposed form of empathy radical is its attention to those most oppressed by white supremacist systems, redistributing power so that it lands in the hands of the oppressed rather than the oppressor. This includes archivists themselves, as those from marginalized communities must also be provided with the power to do archival work in ways that do not undermine their unique backgrounds and experiences. For Caswell and Cifor, radical empathy is “the ability to understand and appreciate another person’s feelings, experience, etc.” (p. 25). In other words, radical empathy mobilizes affective responsibility within archival networks. It is a means of infusing care into archival work.
Afropresentism
The present is the future in motion — Neema Githere
One way to foster radical empathy in the archive is through guerilla theorist Neema Githere’s framework of afropresentism. In an interview with BOMB Magazine, Githere defines afropresentism as “you channeling your ancestry through every technology at your disposal—meditation, conversation, love, the internet —and turning absolutely everything into a Portal that takes you precisely where you need to be, in this moment, towards the next. Until finally, the space between the dream and the memory collapses into being your reality—now.” This concept maps directly onto the archive as it is a repository for ancestral memory with the power to transport audiences across space and time. At its core, afropresentism is a form of decolonization where we engage in the reindigenization of technology. Githere defines reindigenization as: “(1) the abandonment of ideals and systems established through colonization. (2) An evolution towards — and rememory of — ancient modes of knowledge and community. In the same way Michelle Wright argues that Blackness does not adhere to the constraints of Western frameworks of history, Afropresentism requires that we reorient our understandings of space, time, and technology. This project interrogates what it means to build an archive that considers space to be infinite, time nonlinear, and technology to include any tool that facilitates an action. Further, I ask: How does reindigenization of technology take place with the tools used to create 3D scans? I argue that if we confront and experiment with technologies through embodiment, affect, and nonlinear, non-Newtonian conceptions of spacetime, we can open portals to unmapped worlds through Black cultural memory work.
Process
To construct this digital archive, I employed several technologies. First, my own body as a technology that facilitates the labor of radical empathy in my archival practice. Next, sneakers, as Black feminist technologies that produce space and place for racialized women. Finally, digital technologies such as 3D scanning, the Internet, and social media are the tools I used to preserve the sneakers and their stories in digital spaces where they may hopefully be accessed far and wide. Armond Towns draws attention to the appropriation of racialized bodies as technologies to extend myths of white supremacy as well as counter these narratives and their effects. In line with his thinking, it is important to draw attention to the ways in which my body performed the labor of radical empathy to begin and continue this work. Radical empathy is about affective relationships, “relationships with archival creators, donors, subjects, users, communities, and colleagues” (Arroyo-Ramírez et al., 2021, p. 1). For me, the relationships I built and continue to make in doing this memory work were and are integral to my larger goal of creating a virtual museum. With the help of Colin Keenan, an NCSU Libraries specialist with expertise in virtual and augmented reality, I learned how to 3D scan using the technologies provided by the VR Lab in the Libraries. I should also point out my positionality as a graduate extension assistant for the Libraries, where I work in the Digital Media Lab. It is through this position that I was able to dedicate the significant amounts of time and energy poured into the first phase of this project. I have explained my relationship to the sneakers themselves, but I would also like to propose another affective relationship in archival practice — that between the archivist and the technology being used to preserve.
Colin introduced me to Polycam, an application that makes 3D scanning mobile. Using an iPhone or iPad, users can create 3D models by taking a series of up to 250 photos of spaces or objects. These images are then uploaded to the Polycam database where the application produces a 3D model from the photos within minutes. Users can edit their models, crop them, measure them, create and render videos of them, annotate them, and share their models on the application. The app is currently in its Beta testing mode, meaning errors or mistakes may occur. Polycam is a subscription service that charges $9.99 per month or $54.99 for 12 months. Users also need an iPhone or iPad to capture images with Polycam. As an NCSU student-worker, I was provided access to the Libraries’ account and their iPad, eliminating any fees I would have otherwise had to pay. Still, questions of access and affordability must be considered when considering this method of archiving. I have not done enough research to determine if there is a more affordable option for those who do not have an iPhone or cannot afford to subscribe to an app like Polycam. Since I used the Libraries’ account, I also avoided exchanging any of my personal data (beyond the images taken of the shoes) with the application. The app developers claim that safeguards have been put in place to protect user information. Users can request access to the data collected through the app by completing a request form, to which the developers claim to respond within 30 days. In addition to Polycam, Colin introduced me to Blender, an open-source 3D modeling software. Blender is compatible with a plethora of platforms and computers and it is totally free for commercial and educational use. However, Blender requires a working computer, ideally one with a high-performance processor. Further, there is a steep learning curve with the software, meaning users must dedicate a lot of time to learning and practicing with it. I am still in the process of learning Blender, but Colin assisted me with better understanding the interface and how to use Blender to create and edit 3D models.
The first pair of sneakers I digitally archived using Polycam and an iPad are the Air Jordan OG ‘Cherry’’s. This sneaker was designed by Ehsani, and is just one of the releases she has masterminded for major sneaker brands like Nike. The Air Jordan OG silhouette is important because it was the first silhouette designed exclusively for women, released in 1997. This was also Jordan Brand’s first year as a standalone entity after officially splitting with Nike. It is no coincidence that the Nike Air Swoopes debuted in 1996 and the Air Jordan OGs followed only a year later, establishing a clear competition between the two brands. By bringing these sneakers together in an archive, I hope to display not only their unique stories, but also the deeper connections between the shoes, without placing them in opposition to one another. Ehsani’s version of the Jordan OG was released in 2020 during Women’s History Month, shortly after the WNBA agreed to increase pay for its athletes and provide additional maternity and family planning benefits. Ehsani’s decision to include the cherry emblem on the sneaker comes from the cherry as a representation of fertility, abundance, and protection. These concepts are greatly represented in the design of the sneaker and the sneaker box, which includes a manifesto for women’s empowerment. I scanned this sneaker and its box in the VR Studio at Hill Library, using Polycam and an iPad. Once my 3D model was rendered, I noticed many imperfections between the model and the actual shoe. The bottom of the sneaker was missing because I was not able to photograph it, and the edges of the sneaker were warped and blurry. While it resembled the shoe and captured many of the details, such as the vibrant purple and red against the black uppers, it was not the same as the physical shoe I held in my hand. Colin explained that the model could be edited to smooth out imperfections, using Polycam, Blender, or a mix of both. He showed me how to save the files and create an animated rendering in Polycam, then share directly to Google Drive. I then uploaded the unedited model to Sketchfab, an interactive online 3D scanning browser. Sketchfab is also a paid service, but users get 10 free upload credits per month. Users can interact with the scan, viewing different parts of it, zooming in or out, commenting on it, favoriting or sharing the scan. I annotated my 3D model, added tags, and a description to the post. This information is vital because as Sall (2022) puts it, providing as much metadata as possible does not only “honor the work and the people” behind stories, but also provides the means for audiences to “arrive to the archives in their own way,” drawing attention back to the ethics of care necessary for archival practice.
The second pair of sneakers I digitally archived are the Nike Air Tuned (Zoom) Swoopes, a release from the collaboration between Swoopes and Nike. While it is difficult to locate background information about the sneaker, a digital narrative by Kick Story provides some general background on the Air Tuned Swoopes:
“The Air Tuned Zoom (originally released in 1997) is one shoe released in the Air Swoopes line. This is the shoe in which Swoopes scored the first double in WNBA history. Although it is an important shoe, it is very difficult to find any information on it. The sneaker had some of the best and most current technologies like carbon plate not only on the arch of the foot but also on the sides, and zoom on the forefoot in combination with Air on the heel.”
Another feature of the Air Tuned Swoopes, integrated into each of Swoopes’ signature shoes, is a special heel tab that Swoopes called “the fingernail hold” — it was “ a design element she [Swoopes] specifically requested to help get the shoes on, since she liked to play ball with long fingernails” (DePaula, 2021). The pair of Air Tuned Swoopes I have are from their original release in 1997. The materials are weathered, but the shoes are overall in great condition considering their age. When I received them after purchasing the sneakers on eBay, I asked my husband to clean them for me. He makes videos about sneaker cleaning and restoration, and he requested my help with filming the cleaning process so that he could post it on his page. This was the first documentation of this particular pair of sneakers that was shared online on my husband’s public Facebook page. In the video, viewers learn how to care for an aged pair of shoes. When I hold these sneakers, I imagine the life they’ve lived. Perhaps they spent years locked away in someone’s closet, or maybe they were worn everyday at one time, causing the tiny cracks and tears in their material. Collier and Sall contend that this act of holding, feeling the artifact, is also important in an ethics of care as applied to the archive. Just like I did for the Jordan OG Cherry’s, I used the polycam application and an iPad to 3D scan these shoes. However, this time I also employed social media to preserve the cultural memory embedded within the cracks and threads of the shoe. Instagram in particular has proven to be a rich source of underrepresented histories, with many profiles proclaiming themselves as archives. Social media is one way marginalized communities like African Americans are reindigenizing technology:
“Centuries ago, millions of Black people kept their family history alive by collecting personal belongings, important papers and journal entries between Bible pages during slavery. Using the Bible as a private family archive was a form of technology, and Black people relied on ingenuity to maintain their dignity, and to catalog and document their existence with limited resources. Imagine now, Black people using Instagram and Twitter like they once did the Bible” (Denise, 2021).
One example is Black Archives, founded by Renata Charlise in 2015. The page as well as its official website share visual representations of the Black experience. Radical empathy is evident in the ways each photo shared to Instagram features a detailed description in the caption. These descriptions provide dates, locations, and also give credit to the photographers or collections the images came from, again showing the importance of metadata as Salls also mentioned. Though I did not create a dedicated social media account for my sneaker archive; however, I plan to as I believe it is just one more way to bring radical empathy into my work through afropresentism. While there is no dedicated social media account, I did use social media to share the process of 3D scanning. Colin and I livestreamed an instructional video titled “Making Cool Animations with 3D Scanning” for the Libraries’ YouTube page. During the video, not only do we explain how to 3D scan items like the Nike Air Tuned Swoopes, but we also show viewers how to import the scan into Adobe Premiere to create an animation. This act of teaching others how to create their own archives is a demonstration of the radical empathy I seek to practice in continuing to build the archive of Black feminist technologies. Colin also took the time to turn the animation into a shorter video (posted here on YouTube Shorts) featuring the 2007 song “Why They” by Cam’ron. In the song, the artist makes reference to Swoopes with the lyric: “Girls ball like Sheryl Swoopes.” Colin shared the YouTube short on the Libraries’ page and I shared the clip on my personal Instagram page, tagging Swoopes and Cam’ron.
Conclusion
I hope to expand this project to include many more artifacts at risk of endangerment, through community sourcing that may even result in the formation of a new community altogether. Since 3D scanning technology is mobile, I envision bringing this tool to underrepresented communities to invent an open and accessible archive together. Also, I plan to create a dedicated social media page for my archive, drawing again from the communal means of archiving practiced by my ancestors. I invite everyone to view each of the 3D scans presented in this project as artifacts of cultural memory with 3D scanning acting as a portal into an embodied past and future situated within this current moment. In this way, we can engage in reindigenization by thinking about the ways new and emerging technologies like 3D scanning and social media mediate projections of the past, present, and future often overlooked in archival work.
References
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