A.M. Darke is an artist and game maker designing radical tools for social intervention. Still in the class war. Now in the pandemic. He’s in the combination class war and pandemic. Assistant Professor of Digital Arts and New Media, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, and Art & Design: Games & Playable Media at UC Santa Cruz, Darke also directs The Other Lab, an interdisciplinary, intersectional feminist research space for experimental games, XR, and new media. She’s recently released ‘Ye or Nay?, a Kanye West-themed game about Black culture, and is currently developing the Open Source Afro Hair Library, a 3D model database for Black hair textures and styles.

Darke holds a B.A. in Design (’13) and an M.F.A. in Media Arts (’15), both from UCLA. Her work has been shown internationally and featured in a variety of publications, including Kill Screen, Vice, and NPR.

Black digital futures, algorithmic bias, representation and respectability politics, polemic gaming, and ethical trolling.

ARI Faculty Fellowship project: The Open Source Afro Hair Library, is an open-source, easy to use, highly curated, 3D model database of Black hairstyles and textures. Functioning as both art practice and technological development, this work is a feminist, anti-racist resource for the digital media community to address the lack of thoughtful representation of Blackness in games, virtual/augmented reality, film, and other 3D media. The Afro Hair Library is open source so that it can have a broad impact on relevant industries and ecosystems by lowering the barrier for all creators–both hobbyists and professionals–to integrate accurate, diverse, and respectful representations of Blackness in digital media.