Art as Information: Re-reading Quicksand

Richardson, Courtney

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/123166 Copy

Description

Title

Art as Information: Re-reading Quicksand

Author(s)

Richardson, Courtney

Issue Date

2023-09

Keyword(s)

• Archives
• Artistic Practice
• Critical Archival Studies
• Cultural Heritage
• Data Visualization
• Information Behavior
• Material Culture
• Pedagogy
• Reading And Reading Practices
• Social Justice

Abstract

“Art as Information: Re-reading Quicksand” is a micro-study of an African American cultural narrative through artmaking. My subject is the autobiographical and fictional novel, Quicksand by Nella Larsen (1928). Larsen’s life and creative storytelling provide paths for how we may attend to cultural heritage knowledge gaps about Black womanhood by engaging with the informing processes of art. This especially highlights artwork concerning self-definition and self-determination while navigating life within a racialized, classed, and gendered body. I re-present Quicksand as an autobiographical artifact and living artwork to explore how we may produce an ever-emerging archives on Black womanhood from rereading cultural auto/bio/fiction. This critical and cyclical exploration involves making artworks that reiterate and interpret knowledges that emerge from reading Larsen’s narrative—modeling a framework of how Art as Information (AAI) may be engaged to reexamine personal narratives. This dissertation also reintroduces AAI as a subfield of Information Sciences that engages artmaking as an information technology. It involves the study of arts’ roles within knowledge production: how we craft, document, process, and circulate information through making art. I intertwine Information Sciences with art pedagogy and auto/bio/fiction studies. I also lean on cultural-attentive lenses, such as Black Feminist Material Culture and Culturally Situated Reader Response Theory, to examine how we may tend to cultural knowledges that are historically silenced and disfigured—exploring the liberatory aspects of artmaking to intercept and dismantle exploitative depictions (i.e., visual violences) historically committed against marginalized groups under the guise of neutral documentation and curiosity.

Series/Report Name or Number

Proceedings of the ALISE Annual Conference, 2023

Type of Resource

text

Language

eng

Handle URL

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/123166

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21900/j.alise.2023.1337

Copyright and License Information

• Copyright 2023 Courtney Richardson
• This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).

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