Faculty Affairs and Academic Programs
Chari Smith
Performing and Fine Arts
Film and Digital Media
UC Santa Cruz
Harriet
Harriet is a research-based art project that investigates the history and future of Black archival practices. Framed through a Black diasporic lens, the project examines the possibilities and tensions of working with digital systems toward ethical, creative, and community-centered approaches to archival stewardship. At its center is Harriet, a decentralized digital archive populated with Black cultural materials, including music, oral histories, still and moving images, and scanned objects. The research recontextualizes distributed digital infrastructures to challenge institutional models of archiving by distributing access, care, and authorship across a network of contributors, or stewards. Through collective stewardship, participants shape the values, protocols, and ethics governing the archive, reconfiguring questions of access, preservation, and control that have historically marginalized Black cultural knowledge. Extending this inquiry into the creative potentials of archival formats, Harriet’s public-facing interface takes the form of a lifelike 3D animated avatar that enables interactive and sensory engagement with the archive. The project also includes public demonstrations that activate the archive through artistic practice, allowing records to be accessed, transmitted, and expanded through embodied and relational encounter.
