Martine Syms in 
Code Switch: Disrupting Blackness, Reprogramming Internet Art 

Code Switch: Distributing Blackness, Reprogramming Internet Art is a multi-sited exhibition exploring and redefining the history of “Black data,” centering and celebrating contributions by artists of African descent to the rapidly advancing field of new media art and digital practice. Drawing its title from André L. Brock’s groundbreaking text Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (2020), this exhibition explores the relationship between Black cultural production and the legacy of computation as a mode of machinic engagement and creative inspiration.

Initiated by The Kitchen, New York City’s center for experimental art and the avant-garde since 1971, the second iteration of Code Switch is presented in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD). The exhibition builds on a historic archival timeline of radical visions from Black makers and thinkers and brings together an intergenerational roster of contemporary artists to unpack the correlation between body and machine, informed further by the “age of the internet.” With a wide range of disciplines and materials, these artists instruct toward, and intervene within, an expanded definition of “internet art,” indicating that art produced in an era of accelerated mass communication cannot be set apart from a discourse of cybercultures and technology. Life mediated by screens has transformed ways of seeing and—central to this—has transformed, mutated, and modified Black cultural production itself. Code Switch is divided into three “domains”: the first is the time period pre-1960, the second is 1960-1990, and the third takes the view of 1990 to present day. The exhibition at MOCAD follows the initial two domains of the project that debuted at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York City last fall (October 15–December 10, 2024). Code Switch surveys how artists and creative technologists rattle the promise of cyberspace as an equitable site of representation and liberation, upending it as an undercurrent and generative force for both inquiry and resistance.