Resist The Algorithm

The Brief Was Already A Provocation

Resist the Algorithm started with an invitation.

I was commissioned to develop the visual direction for the San Francisco edition of Black Techno Matters’ Resist the Algorithm, a music and DJ series rooted in Black electronic culture, resistance, and community.

My role was on the visual side of the project: creative direction, art direction, poster and flyer design, social graphics, and the larger visual system surrounding the event.

The music already had its own world.

My job was to create imagery strong enough to meet it.

For the San Francisco edition, the creative direction explored sexuality as resistance and queer liberation. The work needed to feel physical, provocative, expressive, and connected to the people the event was actually for.

It could not just look like techno.

It needed a point of view.

Using AI Was Part Of The Point

There would have been something strange about making a project called Resist the Algorithm while pretending the new tools shaping visual culture did not exist.

So AI became part of the visual process.

Not as a trick.

Not as the message.

As material.

The work used emerging production tools alongside creative direction, image-making, design, and editing to explore what happens when Black cultural expression moves through systems built to classify, predict, and reproduce.

The tension stayed visible.

That mattered.

Resistance Can Look Like Making

Resistance is not always refusal.

Sometimes it is using the tool differently.

Putting different people inside it.

Bringing different references to it.

Choosing what gets amplified.

Rejecting what feels empty.

Making something from a perspective the system would not have arrived at on its own.

The algorithm can offer possibilities.

Culture decides what they mean.

What Stayed With Us

Resist the Algorithm brought together a lot of things we had been thinking about separately.

Black culture.

Queer expression.

Music.

Technology.

Design.

AI.

And the question of how creative work can use new tools without becoming defined by them.

It also taught me something important about creative direction.

You are not always hired to invent an entirely new world.

Sometimes the world already exists.

The people are already there.

The culture is already alive.

The music already means something.

Your responsibility is to understand what you are entering, find the visual language that belongs there, and make decisions that help the existing idea become more visible without flattening it.

That thinking still sits inside Sorbet World now.

AI can expand what we are able to make.

Creative direction is what gives all of those possibilities somewhere meaningful to go.