Gladys, Elinor or Nettie

Video proyección, Processing y visualización de datos Dilmar Mauricio Gamero S. (b. 1976) In collaboration with Renzo Rospigliosi (b. 1997) Gladys, Elinor or Nettie, 2022 Video projection In the 1930 United States census, Gladys Morton, Elinor Wilson, and Nettie McCrae were three of the 38 Black residents in a census district that stretched from 7th St. to the Delaware River between Race Stand Chestnut St. There must have been people on these predominantly white streets who wished these Black residents would move down to the 7th ward, the center of Black life in Philadelphia. Besides the 1930 census, there is not a concrete record of the lives of these Black families, but one tantalizing clue: a 1932 photograph from the Sunday Evening Bulletin. The photo shows most of the street, a couple of guys and children, and right across the street, sitting on the stoop of #136, is a Black woman on Elfreth’s Alley. Could it be Gladys. Elinore, or Nettie? We don’t know; perhaps she is a resident of a nearby building on 2nd St. In this projection, using generative coding, the Artificial Intelligence software was randomly fed with the available numbers of White and Black people on the official records and the 1932 picture of Efheth’s Alley. The unexpected abstraction of dots, lines, textures, an s, and colors, reflects the visibility of those minority groups who have been ignored by the image-based archival records. For more information, listen to the Aley Cast Episode 5: An Industrial Neighborhood.