Triton Mobley
![Triton Mobley - [En]Coded Keloid Archive](/sites/default/files/styles/slick_media/public/trion-mobley-ecka.jpg?itok=LOxm04gk "triton-mobley-ecka")
Triton Mobley is a new media artist and researcher whose interventionist works, guerrilla performances, and immersive installations have been exhibited at CURRENTS Virtual Festival, Geidai Games Online at Tokyo University of the Arts, Art Basel Miami and staged in New York, Boston, Providence, and across Japan. Triton holds an MFA in Digital + Media from the Rhode Island School of Design. He is a PhD candidate in Media Arts + Practice and Annenberg Fellow at the University of Southern California. Triton's doctoral research and praxis has been presented at the African American History, Culture & Digital Humanities’ conference—Intentionally Digital, Intentionally Black in Maryland, Art Machines: International Symposium on Computational Media Art at City University of Hong Kong, the (IM)POSSIBILITY conference at Harvard, and most recently at the Taboo - Transgression - Transcendence conference in Vienna.
Prior to joining the Graphic Arts discipline at SMFA at Tufts Triton designed and implemented the first new media arts curriculum at Friends Seminary in New York. In 2012 he was invited to redesign RISD’s Summer Graphic Design program. In 2014 he was awarded a S.T.E.A.M in education grant to conduct research at the Museo Nazionale Scienza e Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci in Milan. Triton was invited to join the Experimental Animation team at California State Summer School for the Arts [CSSSA] in 2018—collaborating on the expansion of their new media arts curriculum. Triton previously served as Assistant Professor in Studio Art Core at the Lamar Dodd School of Art in Athens, Georgia.
My research and praxis culls together critical making methodologies across performative installations, speculative industrial design and programmable fabrications—manifesting polemical art object assemblages that engender public reexamination. A collected body of works framed within architectures of digital perceptions + cultural optics—problematizing notions of being—situated between the discontinuities of emergent technologies and working-class communities. In the development of the installations Coded #000000 [Black] and Volumetric Black these artworks were crafted to uncover the literal en/coding of anti-blackness into digital imaging technologies.
In this latest project the artwork BARS+TONES offers a shared methodology and reimagining of the limitations of allowable hexadecimal browns in constructing digital images of blackness. This project uses a programmed image processor to superimpose the defined sixteen hexadecimal brown swatches over a series of collected images of black bodies in an attempt to reconcile both sources. This project is representative of a series of research and praxis interventionist works that aim to foster new conversations on the future of digital technology design and computation. Reimagining obfuscation tactics for working–class resistance within a digital delay—fabricated through art hacktivist [jugaad] outputs.