addis barge
graphic design, curation, cultural storyteller

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Cornrow Cartography

Exhibition Design, Generative Coding

Also see California African American Museum

Cornrow Cartography is the featured exhibition for the Ancestral Tech Archive at the California African American Museum. This archive presents cornrows as navigation. This archive invites the audience to a familiar cultural tradition (braiding cornrows) and looks to the past to conceptualize the knowledge embedded into the cornrows themselves.

Archive Development

The ancestral tech archive and Cornrow Cartography exhibition I developed was key to the expansion of the brands focus. This archive presents cornrows as navigation. Cornrows as navigation inspired a typographic experiment and structure where the text mimics the cornrows, but then expands beyond itself.

Generative Typography

Using p5.js

CAAM invites users to delve into the intersection of history, culture, and technology through Cornrow Cartography, a form of ancestral technology.

By engaging with the Cornrow Cartography Generator, viewers will gain insight into the historical significance of cornrow cartography and its profound connection to Black hair. Indeed, hair holds profound cultural significance beyond its physical form. The Cornrow Cartography Generator, part of CAAM’s Ancestral Tech Archive, provides a platform for users to generate intricate digital cornrow designs. These patterns are abstract navigation, offering a unique visual mapping of cornrows as technology

Process

Working on this project taught me to expand 2D materials into broader spatial and innovative media contexts. I learned to conceptualize with new tools, like P5JS and Processing.
I built out code that allowed users to create their own Conrow Cartograpy

Exhibtion Design
Multi-media

The Cornrow Cartography exhibition presents cornrows as navigation.. The installation begs the question, How can Cornrow Cartography be used to navigate the present and
the future

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