Slime Mold + Social Justice with Ashley Jane Lewis
About the Episode
What has no feet, no brain, and can’t strictly be considered a plant, an animal, or even a fungus, but is sometimes neon-colored and is often prophetic? Can authors and artists predict the future by writing or creating art? And, is gardening a type of time travel?
If those are the kinds of questions that get you really pumped, you are in for a serious treat, because this is one of my favorite episodes so far. My guest in this conversation is Ashley Jane Lewis, and we talk about the intersections of Slime Mold + Social Justice, along with a whole host of other fascinating connections we both get geeky about.
Episode Details
About Ashley (she/her)
Ashley Jane Lewis (she/her) is a new media artist with a focus on Afrofuturism, bio-art, social justice, and speculative design.
Her artistic practice explores black cultures of the past, present, and future through computational and analog mediums, including coding and machine learning, data weaving, microorganisms, and live performance. Listed in the Top 100 Black Women to Watch in Canada, her award-winning work on empowered futures for marginalized groups has exhibited in both Canada and the U.S., most notably featured on the White House website during the Obama presidency. Her practice is tied to science and actively incorporates living organisms like slime mold and food cultures (kombucha and sourdough starters) to explore ways of decentralizing humans and imagining collective, multi-species survival. Ashley is currently an Artist in Residence at CultureHub NYC as well as part of the Culture Futures Track in the NEW INC year 7 cohort, an art, design, and technology incubator run within the New Museum.
Her advocacy work as an educator and activist has enabled her to push tech institutions to explore new equitable access points to technological skills and opportunities for marginalized folks. As an educator, Ashley has taught more than 3,500 young people how to code, landing her on the 2016 Top 100 Black Women to Watch in Canada, earning her press coverage as a tech activist from Reader’s Digest, Huffington Post, Metro News, and Washington Square News. She’s proud of her work with Dan Shiffman and ml5.org, an educational “friendly machine learning for the web” platform to create lower barriers to entry into creative computing. Ashley has taught at CultureHub NYC, Genspace, InterAccess, Ryerson University, and the School for Poetic Computation, to name a few.
What We Discuss
The tensions between art and science, especially as a Black woman.
How Ashley got into mashing art, science, and technology together, which eventually led her to sourdough, sci-fi, and slime mold.
What slime mold has to do with Black popular culture, what it teaches us about gender, mutual aid, and immigration, and its incredible predictive properties.
Why it’s important for Black, female, queer, and trans folks to find a narrative that’s by and for them.
De-centering humans in imagining the future.
Using AI as a science fiction tool to predict a future imagined by BIPOC folks, including a world beyond policing.
Whether more Black, queer women should get into science fiction.
How much of our modern technology originally emerged out of science fiction stories.
What Ashley’s working on right now and whose work is getting her really excited.
And a whole host of other things related to food, our ancestors, passing information through time, writing as a prophetic tool, and geeky things that Ashley and Brandi both love.
Sources Mentioned
The opening quote is from one of my oft-quoted favorite authors/thinkers, adrienne maree brown, in her book, Emergent Strategy, and Ashley mentions adrienne’s compilation of Octavia Butler’s work, called Octavia’s Brood.
Octavia’s work can otherwise be found here, and Clay’s Ark, which Ashley mentions later in the talk, can be purchased here.
Our mutual friend, Kendra Krueger, was on a previous episode of This Plus That, which you can listen to here.
NPR on Grace Lee Boggs
Ursula K. LeGuin, and please watch Worlds of Ursula K. LeGuin, a documentary about her that I absolutely love.
SFPC is the School for Poetic Computation, where Ashley is teaching a class called “Reading into the Past / Writing into the Future.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass
The article on Octavia Butler as a “hobby scientist” and studying slime mold from Amy Lee Bang
Asia Dorsey, my fermentation mentor who used to run Five Points Fermentation in Denver, was also an earlier interview on the podcast. Listen here.
Ayodamola (Ayo) Tanimowo Okunseinde, Ashley’s frequent collaborator, especially on the Slime Tech Lab.
Google’s “Black Women Techmakers” campaign and the trailer featuring Ashley.
Hear Ashley talk about her projects “Opening the Portal” and “Investing in Futures: Beyond Policing” in this talk (starting around 38:40ish).
My conversation with Deacon Rodda, on Economics + Design, is here.
Neta Bomani (and her work, “Dark Matter”), Lydia Jessup, and Marina Zurkow, some of Ashley’s collaborators on “Investing in Futures: Beyond Policing.”
One story of the history of policing and its ties to slavery.
Fred Moten and Bruja Benjamin
Here’s Ashley’s Instagram post that we mention, where she gushes about the experience of teaching the SFPC “Reading into the Past / Writing into the Future” class.
Grab a copy of “Critical Booch” by Shaina Agbayani, Andrea Creamer, Jessica Johns, and Lauren fournier.
Ashley’s Tree Tank project
Here’s my interview with Tyler Thrasher. And a link to his site where you can buy his work.
Christina Battle, who does a lot of work with seeds.
@itsholly on Instagram, the joy of my social media life.
The art of CJ Hendry
The California Science Center, where I first experienced VR in a flight to Mars.
Blackflash Magazine, and Ashley’s feature.
Watch Online
YouTube
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Find Ashley Online
Website
Instagram
Twitter
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Credits
Audio engineering by Joshua LaBure.
All of my music is provided by the in-house musicians at Slip.stream.
Episode Transcript
Coming soon, hopefully! Would you be willing to help? Email me at brandi@thisplusthat.com!
