Philippines

China

Cantonese

This Mandala was a project of mine during the winter months a few years ago, where I was inspired by moving into a new home and wanting to create something that represented where I come from, and just flowing with life in a circular pattern.

Winter 2019

United States

Peru

Andes

Latinx

Created for the Alternative Worlds Andean collection.

I find a lot of inspiration in the tocapu as a symbol embodying the mystery of the cosmos. My first completed tocapu design, I found the process of creating this to be compelling and meditative, and a welcome departure from all of the time I spend programming websites and software.

I’m inspired by the possibility of incorporating more tocapus into my work, and into my life, as I imagine these designs to be not a part of my past, but an active and important part of my present. They’re also, in my humble opinion, very nice to look at.

Sky Tocapu

A circular mandala with geometric patterns

A diamond-shaped geometric pattern against a blue background

Campfire beside a boulder at night in front of a starry sky

An altar to Pachamama comprised of a striped blanket with geometric patterns and several items ion top of it, including 5 small plants, other textiles, an Andean alcoholic beverage in a jug (chicha), a basket, other textiles, and a bag of seeds.

A man wearing a golden headless, holding a staff, sitting on a rock; a sword is stuck into his chest and he is bleeding, yet looks proud

Collage of a man wearing glasses and a collared shirt beside a wiphala, opposite a psychedically colored image of a mustached man

Wow! It’s been a whirlwind few years. I can hardly believe this is happening, yet here we are, debuting AltSalt publicly for the first time. If you're new here, I suggest checking out the <a href="https://frontend.altsalt.com/about">About</a> page first to get oriented.
With that said, in this post, I thought I'd give more context around the history of AltSalt and this sneak peek launch!
 
The Beginnings of AltSalt
Back in March 2019, I remember sitting in a second-floor Starbucks overlooking Union Square here in New York, chatting with <a href="https://frontend.altsalt.com/sandycha" target="_self">Sandy Enriquez</a>, when the initial idea for AltSalt dawned on me.
At the time, I’d been researching my Peruvian background, trying to figure out who the heck I am (as one does, y’know?), and I was finding it incredibly difficult.
Andean myths and legends? Disparate and hard to find good sources. Any Andean representation at all? Also possible to find, but way harder than it should've been, especially in the age of the internet.
In fact, I was researching full time for several months, diving into archives at the New York Public Library, taking classes with the <a href="https://ayni.institute" target="_blank">Ayni Institute</a> and the <a href="https://www.quechuacollective.org" target="_blank">Quechua Collective</a>, and only after much effort did I begin to get an inkling of what my Andean cultural inheritance meant to me. (And of course, this is still an ongoing journey!)
 
The Spark
But when Sandy mentioned that she’d been running into similar challenges finding Quechua zines… something clicked. I realized, Oh my god, how many people are researching, trying to find content that speaks to them? And how many people, like me, are finding this way too difficult when the entire lore of Game of Thrones is literally a simple Google search away? What if there were a website that helped make this discovery easier?
I filed the idea away until March 2020, when I finally had the time to research it. And behold! Not only were folks searching for this content, creators were finding challenges connecting with audiences too.
So being a web developer, I set to work! And voila, ! built the site! (As one does). It only took a bajillion hours.
 
Feeling Gratitude
In all seriousness though, I’m so grateful that I’ve had the time, resources, and skills to invest in the first iteration of this idea.
In particular, I’m grateful to all the folks who have provided their feedback — including <a href="https://frontend.altsalt.com/sandycha" target="_self">Sandy Enriquez</a>, <a href="https://frontend.altsalt.com/luisaulhoa" target="_self">Luisa Ulhoa</a>, <a href="https://frontend.altsalt.com/shirley" target="_self">Shirley Coenen</a>, <a href="https://frontend.altsalt.com/muditaheart" target="_self">Charles Huang</a>, <a href="https://frontend.altsalt.com/jamie_sa" target="_self">Jamie San Andres</a>, <a href="https://frontend.altsalt.com/jonmorales22" target="_self">Jonathan Morales</a>, and many others who are not on AltSalt (yet!) — and especially to my family who have endured me talking endlessly about this site for the past 10 months.
I’m also grateful to <a href="https://frontend.altsalt.com/rimayraiz" target="_self">Rimay Raiz</a> for entrusting AltSalt with showcasing the fantastic work they’ve been doing to create representation of the Andean diaspora. I’m stoked to have their zines here as a part of this sneak peek release!
Through its memory keeping, the <a href="https://ayni.institute" target="_blank">Ayni Institute</a> has also given me the self-knowledge that has rooted AltSalt in Andean notions of reciprocity.
And with so many possibilities ahead, I’m excited to be here at this beginning as we open this platform to creators, and eventually everyone, so we can start new dialogues around our stories and experiences.
 
What’s in Store
With this sneak peek, we hope to start getting feedback on what’s working and not with this site. This is in preparation for a full launch later this month, January 2021!
In anticipation of that official launch, if you’re a creator, I encourage you to <a href="https://frontend.altsalt.com/submit" target="_self">submit</a>. We’re currently brainstorming ways to build this resource, in particular thinking through how we might collaborate with folks to showcase their work. If this sounds interesting to you, we look forward to seeing your creations!
Feel free also to share this sneak peek URL — <a href="https://frontend.altsalt.com" target="_self">https://frontend.altsalt.com</a> — with anyone who may be interested in seeing Rimay Raiz’s content or submitting their own.
Ideas for future site features include collections, commenting, community creative challenges, and more! There are so many possibilities.
Lastly, if you have suggestions on how to promote this resource or build this community, I’m grateful for feedback. You can reach me at artemio [at] altsalt.com
 
Conclusion
And with that, thank you so much for tuning in. Enjoy checking out <a href="https://frontend.altsalt.com/rimayraiz">Rimay Raiz’s</a> work! I look forward to hearing your ideas, seeing your submissions, and developing further as we work towards an official release!
In reciprocity,
Alternative voices, alternative formats. This is AltSalt.

A new resource for discovering alternative voices is here.

Welcome to the AltSalt sneak peek!

Envisioning the Future

A piece about the conflicting experience of being disconnected from cultures that have faced so much adversity and colonization. It is about feeling intrinsically connected to these cultures and yet being so displaced from them.

i am a temple forged from sun
an army of iron shimmers from its
golden rays off a white cross
lodged into the beating heart of an empire

i am a dying kingdom
the bleeding sun’s old toy
its bloated bodies born from rotten pride
cast shadows on its land of pawns
like a mushroom cloud travelling by plane

i am of oceans apart
a dead culture, a dying language
a history clinging to its threads
starved of its power, forever writhing

i am empty water bottles
squeezed of worth and tossed aside
white plastic creases
curled over and aching

i am dust in rays of the sun
forever going and gone
yearning a time of no questions
kissing the relics of childhood

i am a temple forged from sun
an army of iron shimmers from its
golden rays off a white cross
lodged into the beating heart of an empire

displacement.

I’ve started and stopped this letter about 10 times now. It’s like, how do you capture a crystallized moment of what you’re thinking and feeling? Then you look back and recognize that the person you were before is just an echo, and you’re slightly changed despite being the same.

Moreso than before, I’m coming to appreciate how everything and everyone is in a constant state of renewal and transformation.

We might take someone’s outward appearance for granted, just beneath the surface though everything is always flowing. It takes listening to one another’s stories to feel just how malleable life is; and there’s so much beauty in that.

In terms of where I am lately, I’ve been trying to do a better job of expressing gratitude. Before meals, for example — and I don’t always remember to do this — I’ll touch my necklace of an Andean cross under my shirt to be thankful for the meal, and to recognize all of the processes required for that food to arrive in front of me. In this way, I’m trying to make more aspects of my life sacred, in a world where so many things are made to feel cheap and disposable.

In your last letter, you wrote about how technology has accelerated the rate of change between generations, and how some Gen Zers look to millennials rather than elders for guidance on navigating life’s challenges. I feel that. We’re all improvising, learning from one another, taking things a step at a time.

This also leads me to think about our institutions and cultural practices. My gut feeling is that many of our institutions are inadequate, on an existential level, to address the challenges of our times, including these generational gaps that you mention. For sure this challenge isn’t unique to our moment — still, it’s wild to think how we’re facing a climate crisis, mental health crisis, pandemic, and more all at once.

In face of all this, I feel like social media and technology is a way of putting a bandaid on something that’s broken and needs tending to. It’s easier to caught up doomscrolling, to get a dopamine rush, than to address how we can create a fundamentally healthier culture overall. Maybe though that does begin on a person to person level, like this, you and me, talking about stuff as we see it, maybe thinking about what could be.

You spoke briefly about how our approach to creating technology contributes to the divide between generations and is fundamental in the issues we face. Of course, someone — in this case, millennials, Gen X, and Boomers — were the ones who created and financed all of these systems. So a big question for me is, what are the cultural values in place that allow such institutions to flourish? If we had a different system of values, would we as a culture gravitate towards different kinds of experiences?

It’s a tall question. Myself, I’m thinking of what it takes to make a shift in culture, even in my own life. I’ve been trying, as mentioned, to think more deeply about my connection to the earth and the processes around me. The small acts of gratitude I’ve been doing are, I think, contributing to a sense of consciousness and connection that has started to make me feel, rather than fragmented and anxious, whole.

It’s still an ongoing process, and I’m not sure where this ends up for me. I do know that, rather than taking a plane to see my family in Florida for a wedding this October, I instead booked a train despite it being more expensive and taking more time. It’s a sacrifice for sure, and it was painful to do it. At the same time, I feel at least that I’m living a truth that goes beyond the individualistic, frenetic emphasis on everything being fast, and cheap, instead thinking more holistically about how my actions impact the planet, trying to cultivate different ways of being within myself.

I’ll leave you with this last thought: I recently got myself a plant. It’s a bromeliad, an offset from one owned by my mom. It’s such a seemingly insignificant thing; for someone so mired in technology and disconnected from nature here in NYC though — always thinking about being more productive, more of this, more of that — it felt like a step towards something. Who knows how these little changes will add up. It’s a journey for sure, and honestly I’m just being led by faith and intuition, a sincere belief that everything will lead to a better future and, in a traditional Andean view of reality, that the mind and body are one.

Anyway, I’ve been so glad to be able to write this to you. Apologies for the delay, and I’m looking forward to reading your next letter (which has already been published for a while now!)

We might take someone’s outward appearance for granted, just beneath the surface though everything is always flowing. It takes listening to one another’s stories to feel just how malleable life is...

(Dear Charles #2) Cultivating Cultural Change

Here follows an interview with Alejandro Fernandez, an Aymara descendant and contributor to the Alternative Worlds Andean collection. Alejandro creates improvised and progressive psychedelic folk music and is a second generation refugee of the Chilean Pinochet dictatorship.

What inspired you to become a musician? What inspired you to become a part of AltSalt and submit?

I think partly my musical inspiration I know now, came from my father, who when a university student went on a tour playing guitar across the north of chile in a little bus in the 60s — and he just dabbled in guitar and could play a bit like Victor Jara, or Peña de los Parra — guitar based singer songwriting, mostly recuperating traditional tunes. I think it was this experience which made our house musical, and made my parents jump at the opportunity to have myself and my older brother join a children's Chilean exile music group, when we lived as exiles in 1970s Glasgow within a tiny Chilean minority. We played on the radio, for Amnesty International, at the city council halls, and were a regular act at Chilean solidarity events. My parents always encouraged that creative side, spending a lot of extra money on piano, guitar, musical theory lessons until I graduated from high school and studies took over.

When I saw the call to submit to AltSalt I felt right at home and had no idea what to submit but I really am grateful for you wanting to dedicate a blog to my musical work!

How does your relationship to the Andes figure into your work?

I always knew I was Aymara, that we were not just Chilean but had another thing, that was our grandma's — and that one side of the family had come down from the Chilean precordillera, from towns and villages at 3 or 4 thousand metres high, and before maybe we had come from the mines near Oruro.

I always treasured that aspect but thought it something almost lost, and only recently looked again for that Aymara identity as others rediscovered it, surprised by seeing so many Mapuche and Aymara flags at the chilean Estallido protests, and even more worldwide when after George Floyd's death there was such an awakening of decolonial thought, and I started seeing young people doing Zoom talks, or with social network presences telling about how they had gone back to their villages, and got their grandmas to teach them their language and culture again, in some cases then resulting in whole families regaining their lost language, which people like my Dad still wish he and his generation had never abandoned due to bullying and racism from "Chilenisation".

But it was only recently that I heard a recording of my other granddad, from the more Spanish, Catholic side of the family that is based around Santiago. That side of my family had been broken by various feuds between uncles and cousins, and I wanted to share something with the cousins I was still in touch with, and so I asked my parents for recordings of him. In the cassette recording from the early 90s he mentions the Camanchaca, the fog that crosses the north, and talks of having always been from La Serena.

I asked my parents about it, and my dad sent back a family tree done by a distant relative on myheritage.org which traces that line all the way back to the conquistador Francisco de Aguirre, exterminator of the Diaguita tribe. Not only did he wage war on people both sides of the Andes, but he also fathered huge amounts of children by raping indigenous women, for which he was taken to trial by the spanish virreinato. He even took part in the siege and looting of Rome and the vatican before taking off down south. My dream is to go back to Chile and travel north from Santiago to uncover more of those secrets that for many are no secret: https://www.amren.com/news/2019/11/conquistadors-tumble-as-indigenous-chileans-tear-down-statues/

We've read your belief about music wanting to be free, and are struck by the range of expression in your music — from classical quartet music to more experimental electronic, glitchy music with poetry on top. Can you tell us more about your creative process?

About musical freedom, I feel my journey has been similar to the decolonial one. I started out playing in rock bands led by a teacher or band leader, or where a composer wrote all the parts, sometimes in a positive way because there was a lot to learn, but also I felt that musical creation had to be colletively based, and loved the concept of art collectives and of creating work without some boss or replicating these top down structures where even the piece of paper is the winner. This led to musical improvisation, experimental improv and psychedelic music as a way to say no to all that, and explore instead the beauty of spontaneous creation, and of musical events where there is no centre or stage, where everyone can be both listener and creator.

I've always struggled to access good recording kit and avoided closed source proprietary software for making music, so I used Audacity, featurephone midi tracker apps, old tape based 4 track mixers, minidiscs, and nowadays bandlab - which is like an all in one version of all those other things, with a microphone and link audio mini bought from bandlab itself that plugs into my tablet and gives good enough recording quality to multitrack. Bandlab really helped me through quarantine as I couldn't meet and play with other people but now I'm hoping to start a band or group of some kind and play together again with others.

Also I wanted to add that although "music wants to be free" is a quote from a futurist — maybe Luigi Russolo about industrial noise and experimental music vs written/composed — that Andean music, when played in the Andes, usually is very strictly matched to the season and time of day, similarly to how Indian classical ragas also are written for specific seasons or settings, but in the Andes they also reflect shared work.

So although it should be free from prescribed order or a single master, it can be also be something done collectively by all and as an offering or part of shared work, an exchange or reciprocity with the season and the communal work required for that time. So maybe on my journey I broke free from music composed by a "leader" to be executed in some kind of hierarchy, to complete freedom of improvised experimental sound, then got more into the rules of traditional forms of melodic improvisation — like Indian or Scottish folk music but now I feel it would be so good for it to be an offering to accompany communal work as we did and some still do in the times of Ayni and Minga, maybe the kind of work we have to do in renewing and regenerating the earth after these times of colonisation and the dominance of extractive systems.

Why do you think it's important for everyone to realize they are musicians or artists and to create?

I think social networks, and some music apps and software always present this image of perfection, and are kind of too efficient at the wrong things, creating this idea that you have to be somehow different from or above the rest in order to make music. I think music can be used in many ways, to show grandiosity and how to stick to rules, but also like an expression of madness, of strangeness, like when everyone "dances as if no-one is looking", just expressing their own selves. I think it's therapeutic to let yourself go sometimes and express these things, and I would love to help people reach that inner decolonised person they have inside, that doesn't stick always to rules, but is a little bit wild and free.

You can find more of Alejandro's work on at his Chorus collection on Archive.org or his Bandlab.

Here follows an interview with Alejandro Fernandez, an Aymara descendant and creator of improvised and progressive psychedelic folk music.

Heritage, music, and creative freedom

Untitled

Scroll Cinema — A Tool for Making Scroll-Based Media

Turn out the lights and explore a dream world in Ana Somnia

New feature now available: Resonating

Alternative Worlds: The Andes and Asian America

Mundos Alternatives: Los Andes y América Asiatica

The Birth of Andean Futurism

Bibliography of Andean Myths

Alternative Worlds Workshop Weekend Schedule

Andean Sacred Geometry

Offering resonance is an intentional practice used to cultivate deep listening and connection.

Typically done in person, participants take turns sharing and listening to one another's stories, practicing both telling stories earnestly and listening deeply (or in our case, reading).

After the speaker has finished, listeners share the specific moments in which they felt emotionally connected to the story, for example saying, "I resonated with you when you said [insert moment]." Storytellers can then in turn express their gratitude by saying, "Thank you for listening."

Every story we receive is a gift. Offering resonance is a way to reciprocate with the receiving of that gift, to let each other know that we've been heard.

We believe that receiving and offering resonance is a human right. Our aim is to cultivate more sharing, more resonance, more connection, both here and beyond.

Example prompts when resonating:
- I resonated with you when...
- I was right there with you when...
- I really felt when...
- I really appreciated...

Resonating is not:
- Telling your own story
- Offering advice
- Reviewing a piece's quality

If you'd like, we'd love for you to try cultivating this reciprocity muscle and offer resonance to storytellers as a way of practicing deep listening. And in turn, we hope you'll consider sharing your story as well!

You can find more information about resonance in this PDF. 

Our deepest gratitude to the Marshall Ganz of Harvard University; Mark Fairfield, Cedar Landsman, and Lucien Demaris via the Relational Center; and Relational Uprising for devising this framework, and to the Ayni Institute  for sharing it with us, which we have adapted.

in this PDF.

Relational Center

Relational Uprising

Ayni Institute

Offering resonance is an intentional practice used to cultivate deep listening and connection; we've adapted it for AltSalt.

What is Resonance?

Reverberating with the past

This is the first in a series of ongoing letters between me and my friend, Charles Huang, exchanged via public posting. You can find his blog here. 

I’ve had a lot swirling around my mind the past few days; so much is happening all at once and I often feel like I’m being swept up in a big current. Then there are moments like right now, as I revise this letter, having just meditated standing barefoot on the ground (literally grounding), and I feel at ease.

As you know, I just turned 31 this past week, and I’m considering more and more what I value, what we as a culture value, how I find myself within that and how to live a good life.

Over the weekend, I went to an offering to Pachamama; it was a beautiful day on Governor’s Island where I was surrounded by inspiring community members, and while I can’t speak to everyone’s specific personal beliefs, being together to honor ancestral traditions helped me to feel increasingly connected and supported in mine.

My spirituality is something I’d been wrestling with for a while; having been raised Catholic, I’ve faced a lot of doubts regarding what our relationship as individuals is to the cosmos, even as I move toward practices that feel more authentic and healthier to me than what I was raised with. It wasn’t the first ceremony I’d been to, though this weekend did feel like an inflection point in my understanding of those relationships.

This Peruvian heritage bed was stewarded by Claudia Urdanivia and Carlos Jimenez Cahua of the the Andean community in NYC; the offering to Pachamama was part of an event to honor Andean farming traditions.

There’s so much power wrapped up in our beliefs; the stories we tell of who we are, and where we come from, shapes our destiny.

To that end, there’s an Andean prophecy stating that humanity, in our current historical moment, has the opportunity to usher in a new stage of consciousness, to become more enlightened and compassionate as a people. It’s a big if; nothing about this is preordained in the Andean worldview from what I understand. And we’re currently up against the largest existential threat we’ve ever faced.

We have a global climate crisis at our doorstep; communities are already being displaced; myself I’m uncertain whether I’d like to raise a family because our collective future is so uncertain. And yet as I began writing this letter last week, I was embarking on an hour-long car ride to visit my family in upstate New York, followed by another 2.5 hour-long car ride to visit family in Pennsylvania. Later this year I’ll likely take a flight to see my family in Florida. Billionaires recently launched themselves into space.

Is it ethical to be doing all this consumption? Shouldn’t we all live locally within walking distance of our families and friends in small neighborhoods to limit our carbon footprint? Shouldn’t we be drastically reshaping our culture and institutions to preserve the planet for future generations?

This huacatay, a crop native to the Andes, was harvested from the Peruvian heritage bed.

Recently while meditating, in an effort to address these anxieties, I’ve been asking my ancestors and the universe for guidance. Doing this regularly, I eventually had the insight to try connecting with the value of ayni, or reciprocity in Quechua; and taking inspiration from the mudras of Buddhism, I’ve been holding my hands in positions found in the sculptures and artwork of the Andes that represent this idea of ayni — one hand on my heart, the other on my side; or one hand held out in offering, the other held out to receive.

Having set that intention, one day a visualization of the invisible tendrils and geometry that interconnects our reality came to mind; patterns interweaving, layered upon each other, our spirits as nodes in a vast web of those relationships, my entire being just a mirror reflecting the people, places, and circumstances of my life.

Increasingly this is how I’m beginning to see the world regularly, and it offers so much agency — everything we do, everything we are, matters — and the energy we receive, transform, and project into the universe has far-ranging effects we can’t begin to understand.

I don’t know where all of this leads yet. I feel hope, though. To see my life not as the span of my individual experiences, but the echoes and reverberations of all that has come before, all that is touched in the present, and all that ripples into the future, is both comforting and a challenge.

To know, to believe, that the world will not end, that it will simply be transformed, is so inspiring. As to what form that future world takes, that’s up to us, and one of the most radical actions we can take is believing that we’re going to make it out of this — sincerely recognizing our role in the interdependence of our surroundings — and gently cultivating the inner strength, agency, and intention that will allow us to transform the energy within and around us so that someday, we emerge as the humanity we aspire to be.

Someday, our descendents might look back and see, when faced with the greatest crisis we’ve ever known, we collectively reimagined and reshaped our culture, that we answered the call and rose to the challenge.

Here I'm holding the huacatay, which is used in several dishes including ocopa, a potato-based recipe of Peru.

I’m still working through how this all manifests in my life; I feel like this is a start, though. To move forward, I think we need to remember who we are, and maybe that’s as simple as touching our hands to the ground, offering a prayer, and gathering in community to catch a glimpse of how things might be.

So here I suppose I’m sending you some of the thoughts, anxieties, and hopes that have been on my mind recently. I’m looking forward to reading your letter! And maybe reading some of the things you’ve been thinking up.

(Dear Charles) The Shape of Our Future

Within the Fold

ALTERNATIVE

WORLDS

ASIAN AMERICA

THE ANDES

I appreciated every second of reading this and the observations throughout. I really felt The Last Maven's piece about reading the room, and the situational awareness they have in so many situations and how every moment requires so many decisions to be "free." I resonated with the observations from everyone in the interview excerpts, in particular Buddhika Bellana talking about the constraints you're given in life, working within those limitations, and recombining things in interesting ways to learn from them.There were so many moments throughout that I connected with and I really appreciate everyone putting this publication together. Thanks for sharing it!

<a href="/artemiosans" target="_self">@Artemio Morales</a> Thanks very much, Art! Many, though not all, of the contributions were developed in other contexts as part of the broader Life is a Freestyle project. The Last Maven's piece started as a blog post. Buddhika Bellana's insights were shared in an interview that was done on IG Live. So not only is the zine a collaboration, it's also a gathering from these and other contexts.And, as you may have guessed, the contributors are not mainly zine writers. It's the first experience for most to contribute to a zine. What unites Full Circle is being rappers.

Everyone

Ireland

Canada

Argentina

Bolivia

Chile

Colombia

Ecuador

Mobile Android Browser

Desktop Safari

Desktop Chrome

Desktop Firefox

Print

Kindle

Mobile Safari

Mobile Chrome

Mobile Firefox

Digital Comic

Multimedia Storytelling

Zine

Poetry

New Media Literature

Webzine

Politics

Millennial

Visual Art

Essay

Guide

Letter

Sci-Fi

Interview

Slice of Life

Aymara

African American

Hip Hop Culture

Native American

Cherokee

Irish

Andean

Indigenous

Asian American

English

Spanish

Quechua

A few minutes

Landing Page on Author's Website

Colección Cisneros Exhibition and Essay

GoogleDoc Format

Article Format

Author's Website

Alan Poma's website

Newgrounds

Itch.io

Ebook

A cover image with the text "Making AI Art Responsibly: A Field Guide", & a cute character at the summit of a mountain alongside a flag.

A shovel and axe in the shape of an X, along with the publications title, the author's name Alda Yuan, and info including the publication year of 2021 and version 1.0

The title "Cultural Correspondence" along with the illustration of a hands holding uprooted plants and dirt

An abstract image of bubbles and dots and rays of sunshine in a blue and pink color palette

Title page "Andean Sky" with subtitle "The story of an immigrant his search for home"

Title 'Dear Charles' over a man holding his heart in a meditative stance

Left: a cute blob with a speech bubble saying, "Hi! I'm an artist who wants to use AI in my work!" Right: 4 icons with the text "You'll need: 1) Dataset, 2) Model Code, 3) Training resources, 4) A publishing plan"

A page with the title "dataset". On the left, an illustration of files and papers drifting down from a cloud into a large stack of papers.

A page with the title "Model Code". On the left, an illustration of a stack of blocks, and another block about to be placed on the pile of blocks.

Quotes related to social change by Zora Neale Hurston, Archimedes, Toni Morrison, and Angela Davis

The publication's table of contents: Preface, Form and Functions of Institutions, Six Steps Towards Institutional Change, Checklist for Self-Reflection, and Conclusion

Preface page with title "Institutional Change and the Fight for Justice"

A sketched portrait of a woman who is smiling broadly

A sketched landscape of a person looking out over a lake. There are trees in the background and the sun is overhead.

An outstretched hand coupled with the words, 'Reach for the Sublime'

A Modern Ghost

Choclo y Chicha Vol. 1

Surviving and Diving is a short book of poetry based on Brian Walker's experiences as an African American professional and creative. The book includes commentary about the 2020 Election, BLM, 2020 Pandemic and Racism. Walker started to write the book on his 32nd Birthday in October and wrote a poem each day for 32 days. Surviving and Diving is a reflective piece that describes hope, struggle, and sociopolitical unrest in America.&nbsp;

Surviving and Diving

With work by eleven rappers who are part of Full Circle, the art, poetry, and essays in this zine explore the conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A FREESTYLE.

The Life is a Freestyle Quaranzine

Machine learning tools provide the potential for unprecedented creative expression, but also the potential to cause unintended harms.“Making AI Art Responsibly: A Field Guide” is an illustrated zine composed of questions and case studies to help AI artists use AI techniques responsibly and with care. We suggest that artists using AI should consider themselves part of the broader responsible AI community. As a result, it is important to consider factors such as consent of people represented in your datasets, labor involved in the model development and pre-existing codebase/tools, and AI infrastructure and environmental costs of training machine learning models. We hope that artists will attend to the potentially unintended harmful consequences of work as understood in domains like information security, misinformation, the environment, copyright, and biased and appropriative synthetic media.With this guide, we believe that by reflecting on what is “responsible” for their own creative works, artists can push forward best practices employed by all AI practitioners.Doing so can ensure that they harness the expressive potential of AI, responsibly.The Responsible AI Art Field Guide has been featured by Gray Area, DISEÑA, and Mozilla Festival.&nbsp;

Making AI Art Responsibly: A Field Guide

Within the City

Colo-Mítolo-Gítal

Cat Scratch Fever vol. 1

Different Nourishment: Exordium

Beanie Hat Prototype

This guide is meant for folks working to shift the institutions they are already part of toward greater inclusivity, anti-racism, and racial equity. As racial injustice and anti-Blackness are systemic, that means all institutions, big and small, are affected. At every institution I have been a part of, it has been the discomfort, sorrow, disappointment, frustration, and mutual solidarity of Black folx and other marginalized people that have pushed it toward progress.  Yet this critical work is extremely emotionally taxing. Not only is it painful to discuss deeply personal issues, those who speak up are also worried about being seen as unprofessional, as not team players. This means that those in places of relative privilege and safety need to speak up and do more. But I know organizing for change within institutions is not easy because I've personally caused a lot of trouble for institutions unwilling to confront racial inequity. In the process, I've learned some lessons and want to pass them on.  To that end, I've written a DIY Guide, first to help explain why everyone can and should be trying to address racial equity at the institutions they are already a part of, and then to provide six concrete steps to advance racial equity at your institutions.​This guide is license under a <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" target="_blank">Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License</a>.&nbsp;