A Body in Space: LaJuné McMillian

In the latest edition of Password Protected, former Pioneer Works Tech Resident LaJuné McMillian discusses creating space for black bodies in her work.
technology

The body exists in space, so to create a body you can’t help but create the space for it to occupy. LaJuné McMillian’s digital work is drawn to the representation of her authentic self, but one thing that’s undiscussed in this episode of Password Protected is ice skating.

While learning to code in college, McMillian took a job coaching young skaters in Harlem, and after school she directed a program of one-hundred and sixty black and brown girls aged K-12, all learning to glide on ice. After staging a spectacle with the figure skaters, for which she incorporated computer coding into their movements, McMillian moved into a tech residency at Eyebeam and ultimately returned to the ice through a group called Brownbody. McMillian describes both ice skating and the tech world as places of toxic politics. They’re challenging because they're environments that reject her in some capacity for having a black body. Her attention to vulnerability in projects like Clarity and the dance project Aether seem to be about the slippery sparks of time coming off of a body—a portrait of the self as immaterial, but still embodied. Just as a digital figure has no gravity, a figure skater, too, exists in frictionless space; it’s a beautiful self in movement.

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