Autonets was motivated by a desire to create autonomous communication networks for trans-of-color safety, that do not rely on prisons, police or corporations, inspired by the prison-abolitionist movement. I originally built prototypes of these networks in the form of a line of clothing and accessories with conductive thread and wireless transmitters capable of forming autonomous mesh networks. Mesh networks may offer one of the few ways of avoiding the NSA’s surveillance nets that capture all Internet traffic at the DNS level of communication, because they route traffic between devices locally instead of sending all data through phone companies and international DNS backbones. Using these prototypes, I held workshops and presented performances in thirteen cities in the US, Canada, Brazil, and Germany. Over four years, I focused most of my attention on developing Autonets in Toronto, Detroit and Los Angeles. The project began with a contestational, speculative design approach, and moved into a community-based approach through workshops in which the garments I designed were used to start conversations, spur imagination and build affective bonds.

The first prototype was created for the performance "Find Each Other", performed at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica by myself, Alison Wyper and NM Rosen. These prototypes, a dress and a hoodie, used Xbee wireless transmitters to detect the proximity of the other garment and change the speed at which electroluminescent wires in the garments flashed based on proximity. The code for the first prototypes is here. Later prototypes were simpler and simply turned on LED lights when a button was pressed on one of the garments. The code for these garments is here. 

One performance of Autonets titled “Local Autonomy Networks: Find Each Other” at the Zero1 Biennial in San Jose, California, used speculative design prototypes in performance in public space with participants from Gender Justice LA, an organization of trans and genderqueer people of color with which I had a one year collaboration. The performance built on months of Theater of the Oppressed workshops in which participants looked at prototypes of networked Autonets garments I had produced, and discussed how they might use them. In these workshops, people used both verbal dialog and embodied gestures to express how safety and violence felt in their bodies. In this case, practice-based research intersects with transgender studies as described by Susan Stryker, who states “transgender studies considers the embodied experience of the speaking subject, who claims constative knowledge of the referent topic, to be a proper—indeed essential—component of the analysis of transgender phenomena” (Stryker and Whittle 2006, 12). In this performance, trans people of color are not the objects of study, but the subjects of knowledge creation. We created the gestures in this performance, a visual, embodied, affective research outcome of the question of how to use technology to reduce violence against trans people.

For the public performance, we collectively decided to do an evening performance in which participants would practice the skill of dispersing and coming together when signaled by the electronic garments. In a busy, outdoor art festival environment, with hundreds of audience members, loud music from other installations, roving police and spontaneous performances, our performance group included people who were cis and trans, white and people of color, straight and queer, and we all wore Autonets hoodies or bracelets. After blending into the crowd, one member of the group would turn on their garment and they would do a physical gesture, developed in the workshops, which expressed either “protection’ or “resistance.” Upon seeing the hoodies enabled, and the gestures beginning, other members of the group would join, mirror the gesture currently being performed, and then doing their own gesture, for others to mirror. This technique, borrowed from dance, is called "flocking." 

The performance had multiple levels of intention, including mine and those of the participants. One shared goal was to bring some of the affective violence felt by the participants into the space of an international art biennial, to exceed what was expected of a comfortable, affluent audience looking for entertainment. The participants were highly aware of the power differential between them and the art audience and curators, and the multiple levels of mediation into which they were entering, both as trans people and as people of color and gender-non-conforming people, which are already hyper-visible to the surveillance networks of the state. Another goal was to develop concrete skills for the participants, practicing ways of coming together at a moment’s notice to respond to violence. 

One can see the algorithm at multiple levels of Autonets as well, from the algorithms of the wearable electronics, to the safety strategies we shared in the workshops as a kind of algorithm, to the performance score, which could be thought of as:

1. Disperse. 

2. If dispersed, when I enable my garment, perform my gesture. 

3. When a garment is enabled by another group member, return to the group, and perform the gesture they are performing. 

4. When the group turns so that I am at the front, perform my gesture. 

5. Disperse when ready.

While the speculative design prototypes made possibilities of communication visible, the participants had discussed the difficult realities of building prison abolitionist responses to violence that did not rely on police or prisons for safety. Ultimately, these performances were still performative, speculative gestures, as the strength of bonds needed to rely on others to protect them from violence cannot be built through a handful of workshops and performances. While I knew that stitching those affective bonds was of central importance to the project, I underestimated the multi-year commitment required to build fully functioning community based responses to violence. As a tangible, working prototype of future possibilities of networked bodies, used to start many conversations about ways of using technology to end gendered, racial and sexual violence, I feel that the project was a success.

Autonets started with wearable electronics as speculative design prototypes, but continued as a research creation project over three years where I discussed the prototypes with different groups experiencing violence in many different cities, and we collectively envisioned possible futures of building networks of communication. The project centered around the research question: can I, as an artist, build networks of communication that can reduce the violence that queer and trans people of color experience? Ultimately, because the wearable electronics approach proved to have too many problems to be useful with the current state of the technology, I shifted the focus of the project to the possibilities of building communications networks that do not rely on digital technologies, looking to post-digital, post-media futures of decolonial possibility, which I describe in the next chapter.