i

Announcement for opening reception.

Carmi Tronci-Bell | Godhead

When

Jan. 6–Feb. 20, 2025

Days Vary, 9 a.m.–5 p.m.

Free

Where

North View Gallery

PCC Sylvania
12000 SW 49th Avenue

The following description was submitted by the event organizer.

An exhibition immersing viewers in the world of Godhead, an interactive webcomic that proposes an Afrofuturist vision of the United States in the nineteenth century. The narrative centers on a girl genius named Walnut enslaved in a historical United States where slavery is still legal. The story follows Walnut as she develops an unlikely friendship with a celestial god, the titular Godhead, who lands on Earth and begins to interact with inhabitants via a computer monitor. Once Godhead meets Walnut, they start working together to build a flying machine so that Walnut can escape both the plantation on which she is enslaved and the Earth itself. Through this story, Tronci-Bell seeks to humanize the people enslaved in Godhead, inviting readers to relate to them and reconsider the fairness of many oppressive systems.

Godhead is a fundamentally pro-independent web project that was made as a challenge to the corporatization of the internet over the past twenty years. In the context of a web whose function is to sell products (including our attention), Tronci-Bell sees Godhead as a form of protest, filling the internet with functionally useless pages that glitch or exist just for fun. As readers encounter scenes that scroll backward, read upside down, or playfully crash browsers, Godhead asks us to sit with the discomfort of not knowing, the frustration of being unable to fully understand and the joy of experiencing beauty amidst uncertainty.