An image from Race in Digital Space
Emerging Fields
Focusing on influential, cutting-edge, topical queries of study, Erika's professional background in emerging fields includes expertise in content development, project management, brand strategy, identity, research, analysis, and trending, exhibition design and coordination, and multimedia events and presentations.
HOT GIRLS: Pop Culture & The Transformation of Female Identity
In the culture of sexual politics, there is perhaps no topic more provocative than that of women's implicit participation in their exploitation. To be sure, in commercial and global pop culture, this issue is a significant site of contestation. HOT GIRLS is a book project that examines the complicated circulation of corporate and creative pop cultural trends that influence young female audiences from the point of view of women who work inside the industry. The methodology of this study is unique in that Erika confers with the architects of the culture: the influencers, executives, tastemakers, and imagers to evaluate their participation in the commerce of "hot girl" culture. Muhammad strategically interprets consumption and production performance within the fashion and entertainment industries to identify and package a compelling strategy of market change and exchange.
ELECTROCULTURES
Muhammad's forthcoming publishing project, ELECTROCULTURES: Vanguard Documentary, Cut-and-Mix, and Futurist Diasporic Media, opens up a vast new terrain of inquiry that traces "electrocultures" - the underrecognized lineages and hidden histories of artists of color who continue to reshape digital culture and ideas of race, gender, and multiculturalism as they converge in documentary, hip-hop, cut-and-mix, and futurist cultures. It is an expansive landscape that moves freely and expressively from new digital exhibition and performance spaces to virtual online worlds that touch and play with the tropes of current popular culture, reasserting again, for a new generation, the idea of visual media as a process rather than an object or product.
- Electrocultures (PDF)
Race in Digital Space 1.0
Race in Digital Space, a nationally touring exhibition that originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) List Visual Arts Center, featured the work of more than 50 artists implementing new technology platforms. In this survey of electronic media art created from the 1960s through the present, "digital space" was deliberately treated as a fluid, changing, and elastic term. Older work was juxtaposed against more recently completed work and, consequently, the art in Race in Digital Space created and revealed relationships between various media. The project originally focused specifically on artists who employ digital and electronic tools to create black aesthetics that exemplify theories of race and nation. However, because of the widespread interest in cultural convergence among contemporary artists, the focus expanded. Thus, works in this exhibitionexplored how technology reconfigures broader constructions of race and ethnicity. This project featured public symposium, live multimedia productions, web content, and interactive forums.