Blog 08

Ron Morrison, an interdisciplinary artist with degrees from universities all over the globe including Parsons and University of Ghana-Legon, is currently a PhD fellow at USC and continues to build a body of work that is inherently personal to them. Their pieces seek to understand and represent “residual black data,” meaning the pieces of black history that have been erased through data visualizations that, though correct, do not encapsulate the experience of what is shown. For exmaple, their map piece, which uses glasses you might get at a 3-D movie showing, uses blue and red linework as a way of showing people how information is filtered for data visulization. Their Eyeo 2019 presentation uses 20th century U.S. river cartography to express the difference between viewing a river as a boundary or object used for transportation and using a different visual representation to see it as a meaningful form to represent change overtime. I thought this was especially effective in getting their point across that, depending on how you view things, you might see them entirely differently, and I will certainly use this to guide my work in architecture. Morrison’s work, especially their pieces focusing on redlining and slow violence in black communities are incredibly powerful and show new ways that we can view information with the tenderness that is necessary when dealing with difficult issues.

Ron Morrison