Ashley Jane Lewis is a new media artist and educator focused on afrofuturism, social justice, and speculative design. Her practice explores black cultures of the past, present, and future through computational and analog mediums including networked devices, machine learning, data weaving, slime mold, fermented cultures, and live performance. Listed in the top 100 Black Women to Watch in Canada, her award winning work has exhibited in Europe, Canada, and the US, most notably on the White House website during the Obama presidency. Ashley holds a masters from ITP NYU and a BFA in New Media Art from Ryerson University, Toronto.
“Opening the Portal is a series of performances and prophecies of the future. Studies show 70% of technology is directly inspired by sci-fi literature and film. With most created by white men, this connection between fiction and society is deeply concerning. It becomes imperative to ask, who writes the future? Each performance will reveal a prophecy - a story by a text generation ML model, trained on a corpus of classic sci-fi. BIPOC creatives will gather to add their own sci-fi stories to the model with the intention of shifting the prophecies over time, creating predictions derived from our own voices.”