✧ Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, THE FIRST TRANS THOUGHT (2021)
‘I will wear my identity and history on the surface so no one can ignore my truth.’
THE FIRST TRANS THOUGHT (2021), a tapestry and moving image work with Dance Mat Controller (200 × 300 cm), constructs an archive as both repository and haven for Black trans people and their stories. Entering her video game environments, developed in collaboration with Black and trans programmers, users are asked to respond to a series of questions that establish the rules of engagement, foregrounding how white supremacy and heteropatriarchy structure both analogue and digital worlds.
Yet these prompts do more than expose. They produce modes of resistance. The work dissolves fixed dichotomies, asserting identity alongside fluidity, and refuses the erasure of Black trans pasts and presents by creating spaces in which these lives can flourish. Combining large-scale tapestry with motion-capture video game, Brathwaite-Shirley glitches gender binaries while centring Black trans identities. Figures, lit by projected light, appear to move across the surface of the tapestry, while dozens of eyes brighten as watchful presences, at once exposing and protective, spectacularising and witnessing. Fragmented text surfaces intermittently: “resisting erasure,” “a Black memory has resurfaced,” “I will wear my identity and history on the surface so no one can ignore my truth.”
The work operates as both interface and archive, where image, language, and interaction co-produce a living record. Crucially, the tapestry is not only seen but felt. At the core of Helen Starr’s cosmotechnic framework, this work activates a poetics of touch that refuses the colonial reduction of reality to visuality, insisting instead on embodied, haptic forms of knowing. As feminist worldbuilding artist Anna Bunting-Branch writes, this involves creating “the conditions for an immersive experience within our bodies, rather than without it,” where the work is “experienced more than it is seen” (Bunting-Branch 2022).
Light grazes woven fibres; movement registers across skin-like textures; the digital does not sit apart from the material but is held within it. Touch becomes an epistemic condition. To engage the work is to enter a haptic field where memory, identity, and history are encountered as something lived, sensed, and held. It was Ada Lovelace’s unignorable invention that helped usher in the digital age. A tapestry, a weaver’s art, a woman’s art, becomes a kairos of time. Not linear, but held in relation, where past, present, and future are woven together in a single surface.
A tapestry, though composed of threads organised as warp and weft, comes into being through relations that cannot exist, or be thought, apart. Lovelace recognised this when she wrote: “All, and everything is naturally related and interconnected. A volume I could write on this subject.” Here, computation and weaving converge as relational systems, where pattern, logic, and material are inseparable. In this sense, THE FIRST TRANS THOUGHT (2021) does not simply represent identity or history, but enacts a world in which knowledge is felt, relational, and held in common.
