Romi Ron Morrison is an interdisciplinary artist, scholar, and educator. Their work investigates the personal, political, ideological, and spatial boundaries of race, gender, and social infrastructure within digital technologies. Using maps, data, sound, performance, and video, their installations center Black diasporic technologies that challenge the demands of an increasingly quantified world. Their current projects explore theories of Black Computational Thought, entropy, and forms of kinship that thrive in the face of uncertainty and unpredictability. Morrison has exhibited work and given talks at numerous exhibitions, conferences, and workshops around the world, including Transmediale (Berlin), The Kitchen (New York), ALT_CPH Biennial (Copenhagen), the American Institute of Architects (New York), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Queens Museum (New York), and the Walker Museum of Art. They have been in residence at Eyebeam Center for Art + Technology, the School for Poetic Computation, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Their writing has appeared in publications by The MIT Press, University of California Press, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, and Logic(s) magazine. They are an assistant professor in the Design Media Arts program at UCLA. 

Project Description

Post–World War II, US cities saw an influx of computing and predictive modeling that targeted Black communities, encoding Blackness as risk, an outcome that prevails to the present. The Future Conditional is an arts-based research project that redresses the racial violence of predictive computing by exploring Black diasporic traditions of encoding, information sharing, and trust building. This project seeks to develop a public network of interactive quilts, sharing knowledge to better navigate an increasingly uncertain present and securing Black futures. In this project, technology is beholden to cultural systems whose purpose is to allow people to share the work of circumventing risk together rather than acquiescing to the violent clarity of predictive modeling. This project asks, “What can computing look like when freed from its former dictates of prediction, control, and capture?” And “How might we share the risk of uncertainty to unearth alternate forms of technology committed to practices of conviviality, entanglement, and interdependence?”

Morrison served as an External Evaluator for the 2023–2025 Just Tech Fellowship.