Slime Mold + Social Justice with Ashley Jane Lewis

Ashley Jane Lewis (she/her) is a new media artist with a focus on Afrofuturism, bio-art, social justice, and speculative design.

Her artistic practice explores black cultures of the past, present, and future through computational and analog mediums, including coding and machine learning, data weaving, microorganisms, and live performance. Listed in the Top 100 Black Women to Watch in Canada, her award-winning work on empowered futures for marginalized groups has exhibited in both Canada and the U.S., most notably featured on the White House website during the Obama presidency. Her practice is tied to science and actively incorporates living organisms like slime mold and food cultures (kombucha and sourdough starters) to explore ways of decentralizing humans and imagining collective, multi-species survival. Ashley is currently an Artist in Residence at CultureHub NYC as well as part of the Culture Futures Track in the NEW INC year 7 cohort, an art, design, and technology incubator run within the New Museum.

In this episode, Ashley and Brandi talk about the intersections of Slime Mold + Social Justice, including:

• Afro-futurism, bio-art, social justice, and speculative design.
• The tensions between art and science, especially as a Black woman.
• How Ashley got into sourdough, sci-fi, and slime mold.
• What slime mold has to do with Black popular culture.
• What it teaches us about gender, mutual aid, and immigration.
• De-centering humans in imagining the future.
• Using AI as a science fiction tool to predict a future imagined by BIPOC folks.
• Plus, a ton of other things related to food, fermentation, our ancestors, passing information generationally through time, writing as a prophetic tool, and geeky things that Ashley and I both love.

Listeners can find Ashley online at ashleyjanelewis.com, as well as Instagram and Twitter.

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Music: The in-house musicians at Slip.stream
Audio Engineering: Joshua LaBure