A Letter from the Editor
Salome Asega

Dear readers,
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Welcome to Shift Space, a digital publication brought to you by Knight Foundation and United States Artists.
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Please join me in congratulating the inaugural cohort of the Knight Arts + Tech Fellowship: Black Quantum Futurism, Rashaad Newsome, Rodolfo Peraza, Sondra Perry, and Stephanie Dinkins. 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾 You are the reason this publication exists. I am inspired by your commitment to place, people, and story while also expanding the potentials of how to creatively and critically engage with emerging technologies. The recognition is well deserved and I hope this publication can serve as a home for our collective celebration of you and your work.

On this site, you’ll find nine essays and interviews by writers, artists, curators, and educators I often look to for ways forward. The contributor list is really special and I still cannot believe they all agreed to participate.
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Rahel Aima, Nora Khan, Willa Köerner, and Mindy Seu had the impossible task of finding the edges and framing the intersection of this ever-nebulous and evolving field of art and technology. 1  Nora Khan's essay is forthcoming.These four writers offer rich mosaics of how practitioners are making work with or about technology to remember histories, to speculate alternate futures, to gather us, to be inventive and risky, to push against the matrices of domination, and to create healing and joyful spaces. For readers both familiar and new to the new media art landscape, these texts are fundamental reading.
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Taja Cheek, Tommy Martinez, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Legacy Russell, and Kathryn Yusoff’s contributions are incredible portraits of the fellows. Kameelah and Tommy held interviews with such care and presence that you’ll feel a familiarity as if you were in the room with them. Taja, Legacy, and Kathryn wrote profiles that carried dimensionality and poetry in depicting what firmly grounds the fellows in their work of counter-memory and truth-seeking. Thank you all for bringing a dynamism to how we should honor and bear witness to artists and their practices.

I want to extend deep appreciation and gratitude to Allie Linn and Lu Zhang from United States Artists for their invitation to compile this publication. I truly couldn’t have asked for better partners in this project. Thank you, Knight Foundation for always paying attention to emerging creative approaches and new forms. Thank you Sara Roffino for your editing support and for keeping us sharp. And thank you TEAM for designing this space, Shift Space, where we find ourselves now.

I leave you here to move on to the texts. I know you will have rich takeaways, and I hope you share your favorite moments with me.


Sincerely,
Salome Asega