‘Black Girls/Boys’: troubling images
Filmmaker and multimedia artist Terence Nance says it’s hard not to feel self-conscious, even a little exhibitionist, when “browsing the Internet in public, in a theater with hundreds of people watching.” This most mundane of acts, our constant Googling of things — facts, people, obsessions — is almost always done in private, alone with our screens and devices. Yet Nance, 35, a former Oakland resident, has crafted from the banal mechanics of search prompts and browser results an unusually inventive live performance, “18 Black Girls/Boys Who Have Arrived at the Singularity and Are Thus Spiritual Machines,” which he will perform over two consecutive nights at the San Francisco International Film Festival.
Nance has directed numerous experimental short films and one critically acclaimed feature, his 2012 debut “An Oversimplification of Her Beauty,” a collage of animation and documentary-style self-analysis (executive-produced by Jay Z). He has an artworld and film-festival following for his films’ bracing honesty (about love, race, justice) and stylized visual audacity.
In “18 Black Girls/ Boys,” Nance types in Google searches on a computer (from which he has erased the cookies and history) connected to a movie screen, beginning with “1-yearold black girl” or “1year-old black boy,” progressing through age 18. He follows the search terms’ resulting autocomplete links, clicking his way through the often troubling and increasingly violent images and news stories that pop up as the kids’ ages increase.
The resulting narrative reflects back to the audience our collective predispositions about “how we see blackness, and the extreme nature of the kind of stories and descriptors that exist around black adolescence,” Nance said by phone from Los Angeles. He grew up in Dallas, studied visual art at New York University and now divides his time between California and Brooklyn.
Nance says he first got the idea for “18 Black Girls/Boys” while casting “Swimming in Your Skin Again” (2015), his music-filled short film set in Miami. “The short stars a group of black boys who are between the ages of 7 and 12 or so, and my producer wondered what a 10year-old black boy looks like, his height, etc., so I said, ‘Let’s just Google it,’ ” says Nance. “And the autocomplete algorithm populated the ‘10-year-old black boy’ space with ‘twerking.’ That was disturbing to me, not because anything’s extreme about a black boy that age twerking, but because of what it meant to know that, in terms of how the algorithm works, thousands of people had searched for that and the voyeurism of it. I wondered what each age would turn up.”
Nance experimented with his search-engine experiments in private, uploading screen captures to his website (terencenance.com), before it coalesced into an interactive performance he first attempted publicly during an openstudio event at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin, where he was a resident artist in 2014.
“The results are different every time,” says Nance, but one constant is the sudden turning point when the images shift from predominantly cute to jarring violent references to abuse, crime and police shootings. “Last time it changed really early for girls, at (age) 4 or 5. For boys, it changed by 10 or 11.”
“I started to realize how much the searches led to the extremities because the collective
“The results are different every time,” says Nance, but one constant is the sudden turning point when the images shift from predominantly cute to jarring violent references to abuse, crime and police shootings.
narrative of black adolescence is so extreme — extreme acts of violence, extreme acts of genius, of hilarity or athletic or performative prowess.”
In January Nance presented “18 Black Girls/Boys” as a livecinema premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, where it received raves. “Film Comment” called it “the most original, introspective, and legitimately troubling work to be found” at the festival.
“Terence is such a gifted collaborator and has created something unique in the world of live cinema,” says Headlands Director of Programs Sean Uyehara, who was first introduced to Nance’s work as a programmer at SFFilm. “He’s found a way to look at the way information comes to people, and how that information can be funny, strange, devastating or enraging — or all of those things all at once.”
“The fact that this functions as cinema was a surprise even to me at first,” says Nance, “but the size of the images, the live score and sonic environment pushes it firmly into the kind of heightened experience people associate with going to the movies. You feel the energetic shifts in the room.”
At Sundance, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates joined Nance virtually during the performance for an impromptu live onscreen chat, an unexpected element the likes of which Nance won’t admit or deny might happen again in San Francisco. (“There are no plans, but who knows?” he says.)
Nance did confirm that in San Francisco his brother, musician Norvis Junior, and several dancers will accompany his searches with music (voice, keyboard, beats) and movement inspired by and in response to the images and videos on screen.
Nance will be seated in the audience rather than onstage so that, he says, “instead of watching me, we can all feel like we’re having this experience of browsing together and we’ll see what happens.”