Ari Melenciano – Women of Interaction Design

Ari Melenciano

Brings New Media, Art & Design Together in the Community Afrotectopia

Written by Erin Malone

Ari Melenciano describes herself as both an artist and a creative technologist. She is a professor at NYU’s ITP teaching topics like sound design, counterculture, and Black radical imagination. She is also a creative technologist at Google’s Creative Lab as well as a Research Affiliate with MIT’s Media Lab. She has a masters degree from NYU’s ITP program and has lectured and run workshops both at conferences and at various colleges and universities around the world over the last three years.

I first heard about Melenciano during the Where Are the Black Designer’s 2021 conference when she made a presentation about Afrotectopia, a community organization she created in 2017 to bring new media art, design, science, and technology to and from Black designers and artists. Her work and those of her students explores sensor driven experiential video, visual media, and interactive art as well as performance and sound generated with code and by sensors.

The community she has created is as much a collective as maker space as school and in a recent Forbes interview she says of the approach, “my approach has simply been to design the container and to let people fill it with all that they have. The container has a culture, and a dynamic that keeps the people in that space feeling inspired and cared for.”[1]

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She created Afrotectopia to bring out the work of more designers and artists of color who are often unrecognized by a system that privileges white, male people. Over the years she has added a technology festival, a Black youth STEAM camp and an Imagineer fellowship to the scope of what is included in the organization. The first festival, launched March 2018 while she was still in graduate school, imagined ways tech could be used to mitigate and erase social disparities and featured people with a wide variety of backgrounds, including urban design, policy, education, healthcare, and the law. There has also been summer camp for middle and high school students to learn coding and how to make interactive sound sculptures and data visualization as well as work with microcontrollers and sensors like Arduino.

With her curriculum, she has brought together a variety of instructors who are able to be interdisciplinary and who are comfortable with technology. She designed the school to be experimental and to explore alternative pedagogical approaches. Of the initiative she has said, “This initiative is important to me because this new media world is exactly where I wanted to be my entire life but I didn’t know it existed, [and] once I learned more about it I never saw people that looked like me doing this work,” “Once I finally got in, I saw how unnecessarily expensive it was to be in these sorts of spaces. Afrotectopia is very much about eliminating those sorts of experiences for as many Black people as possible.”[2]

In 2021, Afrotectopia launched an incubator with the MIT Media Lab’s Space Exploration and NYU’s ITP programs. The first efforts out of this partnership was a limited edition book titled Black Metal which was released in 2024 and accompanied performances, lectures, hackathons, pop-ups as part of the book tour. The book features works by four artists who participated in the incubator for two years— Jordan Caldwell, Jeremy Kamal, Kordae Jatafa Henry, and Ari Melenciano —with a prompt of reimagining space travel as a way to “understand the world around and within us.”[3] The project was also partially funded by the Ford Foundation.

Visual rendering and annotations by Ari Melenciano

Melenciano is making the opportunities available to bring new voices into the realm of interactive technology and through her programs, classes, and workshops, she is creating a whole new community of artists and designers helping create new ways of seeing, new ways to experience products and new ways to apply design for a more equitable world.

Read more about the Afrotectopia Black Metal project:
Afrotectopia
Black Metal: An Odyssey of Imagination and Speculative Futures (New York Said magazine)

Footnotes
[1] Sloan Leo, “Dispatch from a Black Future: An Interview with Ari Melenciano,” Forbes, February 9, 2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/sloanleo/2021/02/09/dispatch-from-a-black-future-an-interview-with-ari-melenciano/?sh=7b0ce84776d9.
[2] Evan Nicole Brown, “Ari Melenciano & Her Radical New School of Afrotectopia | Adobe XD Ideas,” Ideas, March 5, 2020, https://xd.adobe.com/ideas/perspectives/interviews/ari-melenciano-school-of-afrotectopia/.
[3] Afrotectopia.org

Ari Melenciano Bibliography