Motherboard (Haiku art / mixed media)

MotherBoard stands as a tribute to Black British Windrush matriarchs whose presence embodies memory, strength, and survival across generations. These Great Grandmothers, Grandmothers and Mothers represent a legacy we are losing daily as mortality forms the natural evolution of life.

Based on a portrait photograph captured in my studio and developed using ethically sourced AI blending tools, this work reimagines the role of elder Black British women within a digitally connected world.

Ethical AI Process

The term "ethically sourced AI blending tools" refers specifically to my methodological approach where all portrait images used were my own original photographs, created with explicit permission from the model. I deliberately blended these contemporary photographs with specific historical artworks from The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Open Access collection:

Jacques de Gheyn II's "Vanitas Still Life" (1603)
Henri Fantin-Latour's "Roses in a Bowl" (1883)
Ralph Albert Blakelock's "Landscape" (1885-95)

These works were accessed through The Met's Open Access policy, which allows free copying, modification, and distribution of these images, even for commercial purposes.

By consciously selecting European artists' historical artworks as base elements, I engage in a deliberate artistic intervention that confronts colonialism in a contemporary context, using the very visual languages and traditions that historically excluded Black subjects to now center and elevate them.

In a landscape where AI often overlooks those outside the algorithmic mainstream, MotherBoard places her at the centre, dignified, timeless, and essential.

Motherboard is not a relic of the past but the source code for the future.

This piece forms my submission for the 'AI for Good': Canvas of the Future 2025 call-out and constitutes part of my wider practice in tech art archival, employing photography, AI, and digital art (Mixed Media) to preserve, honour and future-proof the cultural presence of Black women in global memory systems.

The work comprises two versions (Haiku in English and Haiku in Jamaican Patois) alongside an accompanying Short Shorts video.

The English version was submitted to 'AI for Good'.

Prompt Title: Motherboard: Wisdom Woven in Skin
Prompt Description:
I created a hyperrealistic, painterly portrait of an elder Black British Windrush woman, inspired by diasporic visual ethnography. Her image is rendered in 3D with deep skin textures, luminous highlights, and expressive eyes that carry both generational memory and contemporary power.

The work utilises Renaissance-inspired oil painting textures with metallic undertones in her clothing—blending golds, rose pinks, and earth browns. Her headwrap symbolises cultural continuity, while faint abstract patterns surrounding her reference oral storytelling, migration, and memory.

The portrait embodies warmth, dignity, and introspection, framing the woman as a living archive: her gaze quiet, yet speaking to centuries of resilience and creativity. This work explicitly resists AI's tendency to erase or stylise Black skin inaccurately by prioritising fine-grained detail, deep tones, and culturally specific features.

Retain the photo realism and dark skin tone (vital as AI does enter the realms of colourism heavily)

Technical Parameters

Style: Romanticism, Ethnographic realism, Renaissance, Afro-surrealism
Textures: Canvas grain, fine brushwork, oil and metallic highlights
Lighting: Soft studio lighting with contrast emphasis on wrinkles, fabric texture and gaze
Pose: Half-turn glance over shoulder (inspired by documentary portraiture)
Emotive Intent: Introspective, rooted, humanising
Symbolism: Reclaimed heritage, matrilineal memory, intergenerational strength
Medium Emulation: Oil on canvas, with textured digital depth

Conceptual Framework

My work sits firmly within cultural, linguistic, and feminist anthropology, examining how visual representation intersects with identity formation and preservation.

My choice of the old master style from the Renaissance period is deliberate, drawing on their established visual narratives of social conduct and moral standards (Hall, 2019). By appropriating historical European artistic styles and specific works from The Met's collection, I enact what Tuck and Yang (2012) call "counter-appropriation," reclaiming colonial aesthetics for decolonial purposes.

Without the next generations preserving their existence, Black British women risk being lost from our collective memory. As technology becomes the new tool for presence, it becomes our responsibility to ensure these women are part of tech conversations both off and online.

My blending prompts draw inspiration from my love of the Memento Mori and Vanitas artistic traditions, while my mixed-media Visual Ethnography and Cultural Mortality documents cultural identities historically marginalised, erased, or devalued.

In this sense, my portraits function as anti-vanitas, refusing the symbolic death of Black British Windrush women by centring them within cultural legacy.

As Bryan et al. (2018) observe, Black British women's histories have been systematically excluded from mainstream archives, creating what they term "archival silences." This work attempts to address these silences through digital reclamation.

The inclusion of Jamaican Patois in one version of the haiku engages with linguistic anthropology by elevating creolised languages within academic and artistic contexts (Sebba, 2021). Jamaican Patois is considered a creole language by linguists. It's a language that has evolved from a pidgin, or a mixture of languages, often influenced by West African languages, English, and other languages.

While vanitas reminds us of mortality, my work reclaims the dignity of lives often excluded from official memory, particularly elder Black British women. This aligns with my Anthro-Digital Narratives (ADN) framework, which positions lived experience, heritage, and memory as legitimate sites of knowledge production (Barrett, 2020).

These portraits disrupt the silent death imposed by historical erasure, presenting instead a visual form of intellectual, emotional, and ancestral survival. As Noble (2018) argues, algorithmic systems frequently perpetuate historical biases, making intentional counter-narratives essential for digital equity. From a feminist anthropological perspective, this work challenges the technological determinism that often excludes elder women from digital spaces (Strathern, 2016).

Symbolism and AI Ethics

AI systems often flatten identity into generic categories. My images echo the vanitas tradition of layered symbolism; skin texture, headwraps, and expression function as cultural artefacts. This approach combats algorithmic bias by forcing AI into ethical confrontation with complexity and human texture.

MotherBoard's portrait holds the same solemnity and stillness as a vanitas work; she appears timeless, contemplative, neither fully in the past nor future. This represents AI as a space for reclaiming rather than erasing. Research by Benjamin (2019) demonstrates how technologies often reproduce racial hierarchies, requiring deliberate interventions like this portrait to disrupt such patterns.

Cultural anthropologists like Ginsburg (2018) have noted the importance of 'cultural futures' work that ensures indigenous and minority communities remain visible in emerging technological landscapes.
Elements That Echo Memento Mori and Vanitas:

The Skull (mortality): Wrinkled skin and soft gaze (lived experience, memory)
Flowers (fragility): Yellow headwrap and pink dress (symbolism of joy + lineage)
Hourglass: Passing sideways glance—facing the past while living in the present
Extinguished Candle: Soft shadows behind her, representing lives lost, untold
Mirror: Self-reflection through the photographic lens and her steady gaze mirror each other

The MotherBoard portrait becomes a living vanitas, but instead of mourning lost time, it preserves it, making visible the "ordinary" Black British Windrush woman as extraordinary, layered, symbolic, and central to cultural memory.

This work exemplifies the use of traditional and contemporary art styles to create empowerment and visibility through visual narration on digital platforms. It represents my contribution as a PhD student to recognising what these women did before me and did to enable my presence in academia today. As discussed by Wekker (2016), honouring Black women's knowledge production becomes an act of both preservation and resistance. Feminist anthropological approaches frame this work as what Behar (2013) terms 'vulnerable ethnography'—research that acknowledges emotional connection to cultural documentation.