More Than Just a Memory: American Artist’s “Sandy Speaks,” Black Digitalities of Care, and the Politics of Technological Refusal

This article examines American Artist’s installation “Sandy Speaks,” a chatbot inspired by Sandra Bland’s media activism, as an analytical connective point to pathways of Black technological critique and histories of Black digitality and care. First connecting the work to its predigital antecedent The Negro Green Book, the article then argues that the typical aspirations of chatbot to approximate the human is disavowed in “Sandy Speaks,” enacting a Black technological critique of the human itself. Moreover, departing from celebratory discourses of Black technological innovation, the chatbot's low AI instantiates what the author calls a politics of technological refusal—a praxis of deliberate technological limitation as critique. This article asks what might happen when we seek potentialities of Black praxis in the slow, broken, old, technological forms, not as remedy, but as theory, critique, and an undoing of the recuperation of technological innovation as most legible mode of recognition.