Entanglements: an exploration of the digital literary work FISHNETSTOCKINGSMain MenuStartCover pageFishnetStockings FundamentalsA path of background and documentation of FishnetStockingsMermaids, Little and Otherwisea path on one of the most famous mermaid talesHybriditySub/ImmersionProcessing, Systems, and CodeMovement/DanceSilhouettesUnderwater Paper CuttingSwim Through the CodeA path about the code of FishnetStockingsFellow Fishworks of digital art that set precedentWorks CitedSources of our inspiration and edificiationDiana Leong5f86c388d73d4478d782c449582a052ecb430834Mark C. Marino82e88cf89eeb02b94655b66cf941328b5c035777Jessica Pressman42c474d93c0b66b9f6bb205f58680b42bcf8968b
Brookes slave ship
1media/dl_slaveship_thumb.png2022-05-11T08:06:09-07:00Mark C. Marino82e88cf89eeb02b94655b66cf941328b5c035777393861The slave ship launched in 1781 from Liverpool Englandplain2022-05-11T08:06:09-07:00Mark C. Marino82e88cf89eeb02b94655b66cf941328b5c035777
Like its innovative use of mermaids, FISHNETSTOCKINGS' multiple silhouettes clarify how symbols of racial hybridity and fetishism function within economies of representation. From Josiah Wedgewood’s abolitionist medallion to the infamous broadsides of the Brookes slave ship, the silhouette has occupied a singular place within slavery’s iconography. While we cannot reduce the silhouette to this racial history, as a style of illustration it is inescapably bound to the stereotype. This is in no small part due to the role the silhouette played in the racial pseudoscience of physiognomy. Because physiognomy presumes a correspondence between physical features and moral and intellectual characteristics, its practitioners sought to produce images of the body that minimized individual variations. Their goal was to render visible only those characteristics that were indicative of a more general type or trend. Resolving the tensions between the universal and particular characteristics of race therefore required the evacuation of more obvious racial markers. The silhouette provided physiognomists with an abstract form onto which they could project an imagined relationship between the body’s external features and an individual subject’s internal essence. We can observe this more clearly in the work of contemporary artist Kara Walker.
