The Dash column explores art and its social contexts. The dash separates and the dash joins, it pauses and it moves along. The dash is where the viewer comes to terms with what they’ve seen. Here, Bami Oke deepens the concept of the Black cyborg through an online performance by Moses Sumney.
Moses Sumney performing on Planet Afropunk, 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Orienteer.
It is a novel experience to see an artist carve space through song, lifting his voice over the resonant absence of a crowd. It’s even more remarkable to watch this performance in fragments; to pause, rewind, soak up all of the details you might miss at a live show.
Music events happened a little differently in 2021. They came to us in installments, solo recordings, prefabricated performances often strung together by our tailored YouTube algorithms.
But, despite their remoteness, these performances were never seen from an intrusive point of view. At best, the ability of live music to bring people together was augmented by our absence, our scattered vantage points woven carefully into the staging of each event. Everything from the digital platform and distribution, to the varying drone footage and camera angles, to the sound quality, down to the live chat box—all of these factors worked to replace the experience we were missing: the camaraderie of a music festival.
Further, as artists used the technology at their disposal to reconfigure their digital performance spaces, some virtual performances felt more intuitive than ad hoc. When we see the construction of these performances as some slippery mix of entertainment and labor, a new kind of artist begins to emerge—one that forms their identity between the cracks of the physical and the non-physical, human and machine. We call them cyborgs.
The pandemic made way for an endless list of cyborg art forms, especially within the realm of performance. Live entertainers had to hybridize their stage presence for an audience confined to their personal devices. What felt like categorically physical shows quickly pivoted to a virtual form, or some makeshift combination of the two. The latter is where we find Moses Sumney.
An artist with an eclectic stage presence, Sumney is known to be particular about the organizations he works with, sometimes at the expense of his own paycheck. So his decision to perform for Planet Afropunk, a self-proclaimed safe space for Black creativity, music, and culture, reads as more calculated than coincidental. The platform affords Black artists the space and resources to share their art with an audience aligned with their values. Compared to an event held on Instagram Live or Fortnight, for example, Afropunk caters to people who exist within the margins, celebrating their work outside the bounds of an extractive, consumerist institution.
Eleven minutes and thirty seconds into his performance for Planet Afropunk 2020, sunlight filtering through the trees, Sumney’s “Cut Me” starts to play. We see him crooning into the microphone, a single loc draped down the middle of his forehead. He’s standing in a pastoral stretch of greens, ambers, and burnt oranges, an all-black truck parked behind him. Sumney starts toward the camera as he sings, dragging the truck behind him by way of a clunky, gold chain. The lack of tension in the chain tells us that this is a choreographed illusion and not actually a display of superhuman strength, but Sumney would probably argue it’s both.
Our next view is the side of the truck, where a projection of Jeffery Miller appears, riffing on the trombone as the truck inches forward. In her seminal essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985), which propelled the feminist movement towards a more radical, intersectional approach, author Donna Haraway tells us to take pleasure in the confusion of boundaries like the physical and non-physical, calling for our increased responsibility in the construction of such boundaries. In his use of the truck, Sumney heeds Haraway’s call, further breaking down the ensemble’s asynchronous performance into those split-screens with which we’ve become all too familiar.
His entire spectacle lingers between dynamic and static space. One minute, our screens show a honey bee buzzing around the forest, frayed branches underneath a rainbow, wildflowers in bloom. The next, Sumney’s heeled shoes come into view, the shot cropped just below his kneecaps, as he lifts effortlessly off the ground. A tinted sky behind him tells us that several hours have passed between this shot and the last one. Sumney’s layering of time and space in the performance exemplifies the idea that physical labor and digital infrastructure can meld to become entertainment.
But, while there’s a clear cyborgian element to Sumney’s performance, what do we gain from seeing this through the lens of a Black cyborg?
In their joint essay “Refusing Blackness-as-Victimization: Trayvon Martin and the Black Cyborgs,” scholars João Costa Vargas and Joy James understand certain Black cyborgs to be of superhuman strength, with a boundless capacity to love and empathize with their oppressors. They find these utopian cyborgs in the longstanding narrative of the “angelic” Black, who, in the face of racism and colonization, maintains a childlike innocence; never growing up, never expressing their autonomy, never rebelling against authority. The Black utopian cyborg’s desires are chiefly political, with racial integration at the forefront of their ambitions.
Yet, as the authors assert, not all Black cyborgs are created equal, nor do they all want the same things. Vargas and James further explore the concept of a Black rebel cyborg, unbound to a single democracy or nation state. Pitting these two iterations against one another, the authors describe an inevitable battle between Black rebel and utopian cyborgs, each striving towards their own idea of freedom.
Somewhere between racial integration and total liberation, however, is the need for preservation of self and of community. This gray area is where we find our own cyborg laborers.
At present, we’re stuck on an endless loop of culture. Before digital work gets swept into the cycle of content, it exists as a product of physical human labor. But when a performance is hosted on a platform like Instagram or TikTok, where performers don’t own the means of distribution and where they aren’t formally employed as workers, their labor loses its material footing. Content creators have little control over who sees their work, who reproduces it, and who profits from it. And so, as we often see with Black art, this work becomes greatly undervalued, watered down to fit a palatable narrative of shared pop culture.
Working against the over-extractive nature of social media, of the internet, and of technology in general is the primary task of cyborg performance. It is essential to the survival of our work.
Perhaps we have to think more intentionally about the placement of our hybrid artistic expressions, where they are hosted, and on whose terms. Moses Sumney is just one example of an artist who acts as a conscious steward of his work, retaining control over his musical style, meticulously crafting the arrangements in which his songs are performed. He’s explained in the past that, at the start of his career, he refused several record deals because he wasn’t interested in compromising his sound to fit into a marketable genre. His performance for Planet Afropunk, again, shows an artist who delivers work holistically, distributing the show through a larger apparatus that doesn’t yield the threat of censorship or exploitation.
The Black TikTok strike, on the other hand, shows us what happens when artists and laborers don’t have access to this same level of control. The strike formed in protest of the unfair compensation that the platform’s Black users receive for creating dances that go viral (and largely uncredited) on the app, even as millions of users capitalize on the “challenges” with feeble imitations of the original creators. With the release of Megan Thee Stallion’s “Thot Shit,” a number of Black performers on TikTok began a symbolic strike, refusing to create any new dances for the song until their demands were met: protection from exploitation, acknowledgement of their work, and guaranteed means of future payment.
A new kind of labor has indeed emerged. This labor (we can call it cyborgian) carries amorphous concepts of ownership and intellectual property. It’s unlikely that Black TikTok users will become shareholders or enjoy the profits of TikTok CEOs. Yet recognizing cyborg performance as a new form in itself might mediate these laborers’ conflicting demands. We live in a time where our attention can be quantified by views/likes/shares, and then monetized. If the goal is to preserve and promote the work of artists—from Moses Sumney to indie TikTokers—the cyborg framework brings us one step closer to doing so. x
Bami Oke is a writer and designer based in London. Her work stretches across architecture, interaction design, and speculative fiction. She is currently working towards an M.Arch in Design for Performance and Interaction.