The Skeuomorph (2019-2025)
The Skeuomorph (2019-2025)
Gallery QI (Qualcomm Institute, UC San Diego) and Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit | Multimedia installation, 2025
View Panel Discussion. Read The Short Story. M + K’s Conversation with BLKBX
Description:
The Skeuomorph continues Mendi and Keith Obadike’s exploration of how memory, story, and sound persist inside new forms. At the center of the installation is BLKBX, or BB, a sculptural AI entity trained on African American and African diasporic histories and philosophies of freedom. In the gallery, BB lives inside a dark, faceted vessel that feels part instrument and part imagined device. The surrounding environment includes BB’s self-produced liberation texts, presented as prints, and a quadraphonic sound installation composed of AI-generated sonic spirituals. Visitors encounter BB as a presence that listens and responds, its voice shaped by archival sources, musical traditions, and the artists’ long work with language and listening.
Concept:
The project begins with a guiding question: What does it mean to inherit a form after its original purpose has shifted or disappeared. The term “skeuomorph” names this kind of leftover structure, and for the Obadikes it becomes a way to think about how ideas and practices continue to reverberate across generations. The Skeuomorph grows out of their interest in “ephemeral inheritances,” the quiet transmissions carried in stories, gestures, and sound. BB speaks from within this lineage. Its prints echo the long tradition of liberation writing, while the sonic spirituals draw on the ways Black communities have used music to orient themselves through uncertainty and change.
The installation also acknowledges the contradictions of its own making. BB relies on contemporary technologies that are entangled with extractive labor, environmental cost, and contested relationships to cultural material. Rather than resolving these tensions, the work invites visitors to listen with them in mind. Inside the gallery, past and future sit close together. BB’s shifting responses and the surrounding sound field create a space to consider how memory moves through new forms of intelligence and how inherited echoes shape the futures we imagine.