“The Black Experience through Physical Rituals” is a scrolly-story of the communities I’ve engaged with this year within my art practice. My art practice continually translates/documents the rituals of black experiences that are often overlooked using sound and abstract art. These communal experiences such as dance, handshakes and song create ritualistic bonds that form communities. This project shows an in depth story of the processes behind the different communal activities including Black Banner (2024) and Breaking (2025). The process is the most important part to the making of the artwork. This website serves as a documentation of the methodologies, inspirations, and ideas behind the making of each social engagement.
To keep the prose succinct across the project, I considered a wide range of viewers from the persons who directly engaged and helped bring my work to life, to other artists, educators, and locals interested in the intersectionality of black sensibility and childhood rituals. I aim to inspire viewers to acknowledge and appreciate the seemingly insignificant actions that take place in their own communities, and realize the creativity they all possess.
Each page contains descriptions, photographs, videos, and audio, portraying the stories of different community projects I’ve done. The landing page introduces the significance of the project, and leads the user into the first story “Childhood Games.”
“Childhood Games” tells the story of inspiration, execution, and impact of making the painting Black Banner. Made in 2024, this 41” x 60” artwork encompasses black sensibility, and most importantly, black joy. During the process of creating the work, I wanted to record activities that related to African American culture for inspiration. Due to the intensity and vivacious nature of the sounds, I decided to mix them as sound designs, creating an abstracted musical story. With field recordings from events such as The Black Girl Day of Play, the user can listen and experience sounds of common black childhood activities.
The second page was titled “Art of Breaking.” This page mentions being the 2024 resident for Graduate Arts Fellowship under Digital Humanities at MSU. Through that fellowship, I completed Breaking in 2025, documenting an immersive experience of breakdancing culture. The impact of the fellowship created opportunities for artist talks, dance workshops, and news articles.
Creating the content for any coding project is another beast entirely. In my previous CHI project, “Rituals in the Communities”, I had to digitize my 30” x 360” painting footprints in the sand. While it was a tedious job, the priority was still the front-end coding. Compared to this project, “The Black Experience” included self documented content spanning over a year. What would be the most cohesive way to tell these stories? Which element is the focus, and what content should be supplementary material? These questions resolved themselves overtime, but there were many challenges in orienting the project.
One challenge I experienced was audio formatting. The field recordings of the dancers and the participants at the Black Girl Day of Play were recorded using an ambisonic microphone. This special microphone has 5 speakers that record directionally. This means when editing each audio track, it has 4 embedded tracks in one, separated from top, bottom, left and right. However, rendering audio to a website or any other device, requires modification to a stereo mix, utilizing only the left and right outputs. I used Reaper to convert, slice, and render the recordings. This was a challenge to adjust the layers of the audio so the dimensional effect remained noticeable. While the audio was rendered to stereo, this provided an accessible view of the supplementary materials in my artwork, as the audio is usually not documented. Through learning new techniques in sound designing, I aim to do more field recordings of new communities to archive various experiences.
Another challenge was integrating a new framework for front-end design. I used Bulma as the main framework to format the HTML code. There were HTML elements that were named differently from what I was used to, and there were built in CSS elements that made the process faster. I struggled a bit with making sure I was formatting certain aspects, like video embedding, properly. However, Bulma was a good framework for the dark mode interface that I desired.
Overall, I learned how important preservation was, and that I should continue to archive the preliminary actions that happen before I paint the blank canvas. These archives also shed light on the participants of the project from beginning to end. I must thank the Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative and LEADR for pushing me to document parts of my rituals.
The url for “The Black Experience” can be found here: http://theblackexperience.art/
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