Prosthetic Accessory: MemLocs
Concept
“Dreadlock” is a term that — contrary to popular belief — predates Rastafarian use, first having been coined by British colonists during their initial encounters with Kenyan warriors in the 19th century as an exonym that implied aversion to an incredibly narrow understanding of otherness. Envisioned as hybrid cranial and neuroprosthetics that utilize deep brain stimulation to fulfill their intended purpose of external mental storage, MemLocs offer an afrofuturist outlook on a posthuman time to come and substitute the racist etymology of their nominal antecedent for computer science wordplay. Guided by insights from social psychology, these bionic enhancements go beyond the functionality of their medical and cosmetic predecessors by granting their wearers pseudo-telepathic abilities in the form of remote synaptic connectivity with each other, resulting in heightened semantic interference thresholds, more efficient processing, and improved recall. Equal parts treatment, fashion, and media, this technology is well-suited to an exceedingly wide range of applications encompassing cranioplasty, cosmesis, and cooperative data management.
Protective styling is a tradition that emerged within African societies millennia ago. Historical evidence suggests that communities such as the Akan, Bantu, and Senegalese and their members practiced this to preserve their natural hair texture, reduce the need for daily manipulation, safeguard against the elements, express themselves, and organize as early as 3500 BC. In Ancient Egypt, the sidelock of youth affirmed wearers' status as children, a fashion they exchanged for other – often gendered – ones after undergoing rites of passage. During the transatlantic slave trade, displaced peoples of the Black diaspora continued this traditional form of haircare despite colonists engaging in tactics of cultural erasure (e.g., forced shaving), even serving as a tool to escape captivity, allowing recently freed individuals to store and communicate information such as maps and signs charting the Underground Railroad network to each other safely. In contemporary African-American culture, the acts of braiding, twisting, and rolling hair as they exist outside the market remain highly respected and intimate customs, creative processes that take vulnerability as given, often performed individually, with close friends, blood relatives, romantic interests, or other loved ones. Not only do the physiological and aesthetic outcomes of doing so remain desirable, but protective hairstyles are a way of presenting Blackness as beautiful and strong in an ideological environment that to this day holds it to be unruly and dangerous.
Shared experiences, in conjunction with the concurrent acts of recording and transmitting them, are at the core of efforts to construct identity, develop consensus reality, and (dis)articulate perceived contradictions within both. In 1985, Dr. Daniel Wegner put forth a novel theory of group mind he dubbed "differentiated transactive memory." This phenomenon, as described by Wegner, involves the interdependent encoding, storage, and retrieval of information within collectives, where individuals rely on the expertise and knowledge of others to supplement their cognitive capacities, forming an analog peer-to-peer network; look to the Underground Railroad for a topical example.
Reference(s)
Sidelock of Youth
Contemporary Example
Processes
At the outset of this project, I imported prototype drawings I made in Procreate into Rhino 8 using the "picture" command. To create the base plates for the implants, I used my gesture lines as guides to draw curves around the circumference of a premade head model provided to the class by Professor Scott, turned them into surfaces using the "patch" command, and offset them by 0.75 units. Next, I generated cylindrical primitives, filleted them, and manipulated their scales and positions to mirror the Bantu knot nodes as depicted in my sketches. For expediency, I repaired (over 9000 non-manifold edges) and used a SketchFab asset to help articulate the braided cords. Afterward, I placed toruses at the base of each protrusion to imbue the sum of their parts with polish and elegance.
Deliverable(s)
Black Ghosted Image
Color Ghosted Image
Render w/Inspiration Sketches
Render w/2D Ortho
Materials
I sourced two textures from Google Images to create custom skins for the nodes and braids, one of a circuit board and one of some mesh fabric. Conversely, the toruses are assigned Rhino's default copper material with some light adjustments for aesthetic consistency. The head mesh and associated facial features were already color-treated, so I did not make any alterations to them.
