Projects

Je batis a roches mon langage.
(I build my language with rocks.)
-Edouard Glissant Poetic Intention

This installation sieves poetry and imagery from stories of ecological, anti-Black, anti-Working poor violence of America. Riprap is a poem constructed from language produced with a custom Recurrent Neural Network (AI). Kelley trained the AI on Muriel Rukeyser’s poem The Book of the Dead, U.S. congressional testimony on the Hawks Nest Tragedy (the mining accident referred to in The Book of the Dead), and essays by Sarah Ehlers, Saidiya Hartman, Tavia Nyong’o, Hortense Spillers, and Kathryn Yussof. Kelley co-fabulates with the AI to write new poems, at once extracting from American history, Rukeyser’s poetry, and simultaneously revising history, imagining alternative pasts and futures. The words fall like rain down two black video screens into a pile of granite stones.

The photographs consider the agency of minerals, animals, and objects amidst the traumas of humans, particularly non-white humans, objectified through slavery, colonialism, and environmental emergency by racialized capitalism.

Riprap is architectural form in which stones are laid side by side to make a water break on path or road. Beat poet Gary Snyder wrote a poem called Riprap -

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:

The score is composed with in collaboration with the Kayla McIntyre.

This project is third in the series of ongoing works Kelley has made based on the documentary poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, which in chronological order include: The Book of the Dead, NONHUMAN, and Riprap.

Je batis a roches mon langage.
(I build my language with rocks.)
-Edouard Glissant Poetic Intention

This installation sieves poetry and imagery from stories of ecological, anti-Black, anti-Working poor violence of America. Riprap is a poem constructed from language produced with a custom Recurrent Neural Network (AI). Kelley trained the AI on Muriel Rukeyser’s poem The Book of the Dead, U.S. congressional testimony on the Hawks Nest Tragedy (the mining accident referred to in The Book of the Dead), and essays by Sarah Ehlers, Saidiya Hartman, Tavia Nyong’o, Hortense Spillers, and Kathryn Yussof. Kelley co-fabulates with the AI to write new poems, at once extracting from American history, Rukeyser’s poetry, and simultaneously revising history, imagining alternative pasts and futures. The words fall like rain down two black video screens into a pile of granite stones.

The photographs consider the agency of minerals, animals, and objects amidst the traumas of humans, particularly non-white humans, objectified through slavery, colonialism, and environmental emergency by racialized capitalism.

Riprap is architectural form in which stones are laid side by side to make a water break on path or road. Beat poet Gary Snyder wrote a poem called Riprap -

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:

The score is composed with in collaboration with the Kayla McIntyre.

This project is third in the series of ongoing works Kelley has made based on the documentary poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, which in chronological order include: The Book of the Dead, NONHUMAN, and Riprap.

Je batis a roches mon langage.
(I build my language with rocks.)
-Edouard Glissant Poetic Intention

This installation sieves poetry and imagery from stories of ecological, anti-Black, anti-Working poor violence of America. Riprap is a poem constructed from language produced with a custom Recurrent Neural Network (AI). Kelley trained the AI on Muriel Rukeyser’s poem The Book of the Dead, U.S. congressional testimony on the Hawks Nest Tragedy (the mining accident referred to in The Book of the Dead), and essays by Sarah Ehlers, Saidiya Hartman, Tavia Nyong’o, Hortense Spillers, and Kathryn Yussof. Kelley co-fabulates with the AI to write new poems, at once extracting from American history, Rukeyser’s poetry, and simultaneously revising history, imagining alternative pasts and futures. The words fall like rain down two black video screens into a pile of granite stones.

The photographs consider the agency of minerals, animals, and objects amidst the traumas of humans, particularly non-white humans, objectified through slavery, colonialism, and environmental emergency by racialized capitalism.

Riprap is architectural form in which stones are laid side by side to make a water break on path or road. Beat poet Gary Snyder wrote a poem called Riprap -

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:

The score is composed with in collaboration with the Kayla McIntyre.

This project is third in the series of ongoing works Kelley has made based on the documentary poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, which in chronological order include: The Book of the Dead, NONHUMAN, and Riprap.

Je batis a roches mon langage.
(I build my language with rocks.)
-Edouard Glissant Poetic Intention

This installation sieves poetry and imagery from stories of ecological, anti-Black, anti-Working poor violence of America. Riprap is a poem constructed from language produced with a custom Recurrent Neural Network (AI). Kelley trained the AI on Muriel Rukeyser’s poem The Book of the Dead, U.S. congressional testimony on the Hawks Nest Tragedy (the mining accident referred to in The Book of the Dead), and essays by Sarah Ehlers, Saidiya Hartman, Tavia Nyong’o, Hortense Spillers, and Kathryn Yussof. Kelley co-fabulates with the AI to write new poems, at once extracting from American history, Rukeyser’s poetry, and simultaneously revising history, imagining alternative pasts and futures. The words fall like rain down two black video screens into a pile of granite stones.

The photographs consider the agency of minerals, animals, and objects amidst the traumas of humans, particularly non-white humans, objectified through slavery, colonialism, and environmental emergency by racialized capitalism.

Riprap is architectural form in which stones are laid side by side to make a water break on path or road. Beat poet Gary Snyder wrote a poem called Riprap -

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:

The score is composed with in collaboration with the Kayla McIntyre.

This project is third in the series of ongoing works Kelley has made based on the documentary poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, which in chronological order include: The Book of the Dead, NONHUMAN, and Riprap.

Je batis a roches mon langage.
(I build my language with rocks.)
-Edouard Glissant Poetic Intention

This installation sieves poetry and imagery from stories of ecological, anti-Black, anti-Working poor violence of America. Riprap is a poem constructed from language produced with a custom Recurrent Neural Network (AI). Kelley trained the AI on Muriel Rukeyser’s poem The Book of the Dead, U.S. congressional testimony on the Hawks Nest Tragedy (the mining accident referred to in The Book of the Dead), and essays by Sarah Ehlers, Saidiya Hartman, Tavia Nyong’o, Hortense Spillers, and Kathryn Yussof. Kelley co-fabulates with the AI to write new poems, at once extracting from American history, Rukeyser’s poetry, and simultaneously revising history, imagining alternative pasts and futures. The words fall like rain down two black video screens into a pile of granite stones.

The photographs consider the agency of minerals, animals, and objects amidst the traumas of humans, particularly non-white humans, objectified through slavery, colonialism, and environmental emergency by racialized capitalism.

Riprap is architectural form in which stones are laid side by side to make a water break on path or road. Beat poet Gary Snyder wrote a poem called Riprap -

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:

The score is composed with in collaboration with the Kayla McIntyre.

This project is third in the series of ongoing works Kelley has made based on the documentary poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, which in chronological order include: The Book of the Dead, NONHUMAN, and Riprap.

Je batis a roches mon langage.
(I build my language with rocks.)
-Edouard Glissant Poetic Intention

This installation sieves poetry and imagery from stories of ecological, anti-Black, anti-Working poor violence of America. Riprap is a poem constructed from language produced with a custom Recurrent Neural Network (AI). Kelley trained the AI on Muriel Rukeyser’s poem The Book of the Dead, U.S. congressional testimony on the Hawks Nest Tragedy (the mining accident referred to in The Book of the Dead), and essays by Sarah Ehlers, Saidiya Hartman, Tavia Nyong’o, Hortense Spillers, and Kathryn Yussof. Kelley co-fabulates with the AI to write new poems, at once extracting from American history, Rukeyser’s poetry, and simultaneously revising history, imagining alternative pasts and futures. The words fall like rain down two black video screens into a pile of granite stones.

The photographs consider the agency of minerals, animals, and objects amidst the traumas of humans, particularly non-white humans, objectified through slavery, colonialism, and environmental emergency by racialized capitalism.

Riprap is architectural form in which stones are laid side by side to make a water break on path or road. Beat poet Gary Snyder wrote a poem called Riprap -

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:

The score is composed with in collaboration with the Kayla McIntyre.

This project is third in the series of ongoing works Kelley has made based on the documentary poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, which in chronological order include: The Book of the Dead, NONHUMAN, and Riprap.

Je batis a roches mon langage.
(I build my language with rocks.)
-Edouard Glissant Poetic Intention

This installation sieves poetry and imagery from stories of ecological, anti-Black, anti-Working poor violence of America. Riprap is a poem constructed from language produced with a custom Recurrent Neural Network (AI). Kelley trained the AI on Muriel Rukeyser’s poem The Book of the Dead, U.S. congressional testimony on the Hawks Nest Tragedy (the mining accident referred to in The Book of the Dead), and essays by Sarah Ehlers, Saidiya Hartman, Tavia Nyong’o, Hortense Spillers, and Kathryn Yussof. Kelley co-fabulates with the AI to write new poems, at once extracting from American history, Rukeyser’s poetry, and simultaneously revising history, imagining alternative pasts and futures. The words fall like rain down two black video screens into a pile of granite stones.

The photographs consider the agency of minerals, animals, and objects amidst the traumas of humans, particularly non-white humans, objectified through slavery, colonialism, and environmental emergency by racialized capitalism.

Riprap is architectural form in which stones are laid side by side to make a water break on path or road. Beat poet Gary Snyder wrote a poem called Riprap -

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:

The score is composed with in collaboration with the Kayla McIntyre.

This project is third in the series of ongoing works Kelley has made based on the documentary poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, which in chronological order include: The Book of the Dead, NONHUMAN, and Riprap.

Je batis a roches mon langage.
(I build my language with rocks.)
-Edouard Glissant Poetic Intention

This installation sieves poetry and imagery from stories of ecological, anti-Black, anti-Working poor violence of America. Riprap is a poem constructed from language produced with a custom Recurrent Neural Network (AI). Kelley trained the AI on Muriel Rukeyser’s poem The Book of the Dead, U.S. congressional testimony on the Hawks Nest Tragedy (the mining accident referred to in The Book of the Dead), and essays by Sarah Ehlers, Saidiya Hartman, Tavia Nyong’o, Hortense Spillers, and Kathryn Yussof. Kelley co-fabulates with the AI to write new poems, at once extracting from American history, Rukeyser’s poetry, and simultaneously revising history, imagining alternative pasts and futures. The words fall like rain down two black video screens into a pile of granite stones.

The photographs consider the agency of minerals, animals, and objects amidst the traumas of humans, particularly non-white humans, objectified through slavery, colonialism, and environmental emergency by racialized capitalism.

Riprap is architectural form in which stones are laid side by side to make a water break on path or road. Beat poet Gary Snyder wrote a poem called Riprap -

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:

The score is composed with in collaboration with the Kayla McIntyre.

This project is third in the series of ongoing works Kelley has made based on the documentary poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, which in chronological order include: The Book of the Dead, NONHUMAN, and Riprap.

Je batis a roches mon langage.
(I build my language with rocks.)
-Edouard Glissant Poetic Intention

This installation sieves poetry and imagery from stories of ecological, anti-Black, anti-Working poor violence of America. Riprap is a poem constructed from language produced with a custom Recurrent Neural Network (AI). Kelley trained the AI on Muriel Rukeyser’s poem The Book of the Dead, U.S. congressional testimony on the Hawks Nest Tragedy (the mining accident referred to in The Book of the Dead), and essays by Sarah Ehlers, Saidiya Hartman, Tavia Nyong’o, Hortense Spillers, and Kathryn Yussof. Kelley co-fabulates with the AI to write new poems, at once extracting from American history, Rukeyser’s poetry, and simultaneously revising history, imagining alternative pasts and futures. The words fall like rain down two black video screens into a pile of granite stones.

The photographs consider the agency of minerals, animals, and objects amidst the traumas of humans, particularly non-white humans, objectified through slavery, colonialism, and environmental emergency by racialized capitalism.

Riprap is architectural form in which stones are laid side by side to make a water break on path or road. Beat poet Gary Snyder wrote a poem called Riprap -

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:

The score is composed with in collaboration with the Kayla McIntyre.

This project is third in the series of ongoing works Kelley has made based on the documentary poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, which in chronological order include: The Book of the Dead, NONHUMAN, and Riprap.

Je batis a roches mon langage.
(I build my language with rocks.)
-Edouard Glissant Poetic Intention

This installation sieves poetry and imagery from stories of ecological, anti-Black, anti-Working poor violence of America. Riprap is a poem constructed from language produced with a custom Recurrent Neural Network (AI). Kelley trained the AI on Muriel Rukeyser’s poem The Book of the Dead, U.S. congressional testimony on the Hawks Nest Tragedy (the mining accident referred to in The Book of the Dead), and essays by Sarah Ehlers, Saidiya Hartman, Tavia Nyong’o, Hortense Spillers, and Kathryn Yussof. Kelley co-fabulates with the AI to write new poems, at once extracting from American history, Rukeyser’s poetry, and simultaneously revising history, imagining alternative pasts and futures. The words fall like rain down two black video screens into a pile of granite stones.

The photographs consider the agency of minerals, animals, and objects amidst the traumas of humans, particularly non-white humans, objectified through slavery, colonialism, and environmental emergency by racialized capitalism.

Riprap is architectural form in which stones are laid side by side to make a water break on path or road. Beat poet Gary Snyder wrote a poem called Riprap -

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:

The score is composed with in collaboration with the Kayla McIntyre.

This project is third in the series of ongoing works Kelley has made based on the documentary poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, which in chronological order include: The Book of the Dead, NONHUMAN, and Riprap.

Je batis a roches mon langage.
(I build my language with rocks.)
-Edouard Glissant Poetic Intention

This installation sieves poetry and imagery from stories of ecological, anti-Black, anti-Working poor violence of America. Riprap is a poem constructed from language produced with a custom Recurrent Neural Network (AI). Kelley trained the AI on Muriel Rukeyser’s poem The Book of the Dead, U.S. congressional testimony on the Hawks Nest Tragedy (the mining accident referred to in The Book of the Dead), and essays by Sarah Ehlers, Saidiya Hartman, Tavia Nyong’o, Hortense Spillers, and Kathryn Yussof. Kelley co-fabulates with the AI to write new poems, at once extracting from American history, Rukeyser’s poetry, and simultaneously revising history, imagining alternative pasts and futures. The words fall like rain down two black video screens into a pile of granite stones.

The photographs consider the agency of minerals, animals, and objects amidst the traumas of humans, particularly non-white humans, objectified through slavery, colonialism, and environmental emergency by racialized capitalism.

Riprap is architectural form in which stones are laid side by side to make a water break on path or road. Beat poet Gary Snyder wrote a poem called Riprap -

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:

The score is composed with in collaboration with the Kayla McIntyre.

This project is third in the series of ongoing works Kelley has made based on the documentary poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, which in chronological order include: The Book of the Dead, NONHUMAN, and Riprap.

Je batis a roches mon langage.
(I build my language with rocks.)
-Edouard Glissant Poetic Intention

This installation sieves poetry and imagery from stories of ecological, anti-Black, anti-Working poor violence of America. Riprap is a poem constructed from language produced with a custom Recurrent Neural Network (AI). Kelley trained the AI on Muriel Rukeyser’s poem The Book of the Dead, U.S. congressional testimony on the Hawks Nest Tragedy (the mining accident referred to in The Book of the Dead), and essays by Sarah Ehlers, Saidiya Hartman, Tavia Nyong’o, Hortense Spillers, and Kathryn Yussof. Kelley co-fabulates with the AI to write new poems, at once extracting from American history, Rukeyser’s poetry, and simultaneously revising history, imagining alternative pasts and futures. The words fall like rain down two black video screens into a pile of granite stones.

The photographs consider the agency of minerals, animals, and objects amidst the traumas of humans, particularly non-white humans, objectified through slavery, colonialism, and environmental emergency by racialized capitalism.

Riprap is architectural form in which stones are laid side by side to make a water break on path or road. Beat poet Gary Snyder wrote a poem called Riprap -

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:

The score is composed with in collaboration with the Kayla McIntyre.

This project is third in the series of ongoing works Kelley has made based on the documentary poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, which in chronological order include: The Book of the Dead, NONHUMAN, and Riprap.

Je batis a roches mon langage.
(I build my language with rocks.)
-Edouard Glissant Poetic Intention

This installation sieves poetry and imagery from stories of ecological, anti-Black, anti-Working poor violence of America. Riprap is a poem constructed from language produced with a custom Recurrent Neural Network (AI). Kelley trained the AI on Muriel Rukeyser’s poem The Book of the Dead, U.S. congressional testimony on the Hawks Nest Tragedy (the mining accident referred to in The Book of the Dead), and essays by Sarah Ehlers, Saidiya Hartman, Tavia Nyong’o, Hortense Spillers, and Kathryn Yussof. Kelley co-fabulates with the AI to write new poems, at once extracting from American history, Rukeyser’s poetry, and simultaneously revising history, imagining alternative pasts and futures. The words fall like rain down two black video screens into a pile of granite stones.

The photographs consider the agency of minerals, animals, and objects amidst the traumas of humans, particularly non-white humans, objectified through slavery, colonialism, and environmental emergency by racialized capitalism.

Riprap is architectural form in which stones are laid side by side to make a water break on path or road. Beat poet Gary Snyder wrote a poem called Riprap -

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:

The score is composed with in collaboration with the Kayla McIntyre.

This project is third in the series of ongoing works Kelley has made based on the documentary poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, which in chronological order include: The Book of the Dead, NONHUMAN, and Riprap.

Je batis a roches mon langage.
(I build my language with rocks.)
-Edouard Glissant Poetic Intention

This installation sieves poetry and imagery from stories of ecological, anti-Black, anti-Working poor violence of America. Riprap is a poem constructed from language produced with a custom Recurrent Neural Network (AI). Kelley trained the AI on Muriel Rukeyser’s poem The Book of the Dead, U.S. congressional testimony on the Hawks Nest Tragedy (the mining accident referred to in The Book of the Dead), and essays by Sarah Ehlers, Saidiya Hartman, Tavia Nyong’o, Hortense Spillers, and Kathryn Yussof. Kelley co-fabulates with the AI to write new poems, at once extracting from American history, Rukeyser’s poetry, and simultaneously revising history, imagining alternative pasts and futures. The words fall like rain down two black video screens into a pile of granite stones.

The photographs consider the agency of minerals, animals, and objects amidst the traumas of humans, particularly non-white humans, objectified through slavery, colonialism, and environmental emergency by racialized capitalism.

Riprap is architectural form in which stones are laid side by side to make a water break on path or road. Beat poet Gary Snyder wrote a poem called Riprap -

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:

The score is composed with in collaboration with the Kayla McIntyre.

This project is third in the series of ongoing works Kelley has made based on the documentary poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, which in chronological order include: The Book of the Dead, NONHUMAN, and Riprap.

Je batis a roches mon langage.
(I build my language with rocks.)
-Edouard Glissant Poetic Intention

This installation sieves poetry and imagery from stories of ecological, anti-Black, anti-Working poor violence of America. Riprap is a poem constructed from language produced with a custom Recurrent Neural Network (AI). Kelley trained the AI on Muriel Rukeyser’s poem The Book of the Dead, U.S. congressional testimony on the Hawks Nest Tragedy (the mining accident referred to in The Book of the Dead), and essays by Sarah Ehlers, Saidiya Hartman, Tavia Nyong’o, Hortense Spillers, and Kathryn Yussof. Kelley co-fabulates with the AI to write new poems, at once extracting from American history, Rukeyser’s poetry, and simultaneously revising history, imagining alternative pasts and futures. The words fall like rain down two black video screens into a pile of granite stones.

The photographs consider the agency of minerals, animals, and objects amidst the traumas of humans, particularly non-white humans, objectified through slavery, colonialism, and environmental emergency by racialized capitalism.

Riprap is architectural form in which stones are laid side by side to make a water break on path or road. Beat poet Gary Snyder wrote a poem called Riprap -

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:

The score is composed with in collaboration with the Kayla McIntyre.

This project is third in the series of ongoing works Kelley has made based on the documentary poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, which in chronological order include: The Book of the Dead, NONHUMAN, and Riprap.

Je batis a roches mon langage.
(I build my language with rocks.)
-Edouard Glissant Poetic Intention

This installation sieves poetry and imagery from stories of ecological, anti-Black, anti-Working poor violence of America. Riprap is a poem constructed from language produced with a custom Recurrent Neural Network (AI). Kelley trained the AI on Muriel Rukeyser’s poem The Book of the Dead, U.S. congressional testimony on the Hawks Nest Tragedy (the mining accident referred to in The Book of the Dead), and essays by Sarah Ehlers, Saidiya Hartman, Tavia Nyong’o, Hortense Spillers, and Kathryn Yussof. Kelley co-fabulates with the AI to write new poems, at once extracting from American history, Rukeyser’s poetry, and simultaneously revising history, imagining alternative pasts and futures. The words fall like rain down two black video screens into a pile of granite stones.

The photographs consider the agency of minerals, animals, and objects amidst the traumas of humans, particularly non-white humans, objectified through slavery, colonialism, and environmental emergency by racialized capitalism.

Riprap is architectural form in which stones are laid side by side to make a water break on path or road. Beat poet Gary Snyder wrote a poem called Riprap -

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:

The score is composed with in collaboration with the Kayla McIntyre.

This project is third in the series of ongoing works Kelley has made based on the documentary poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, which in chronological order include: The Book of the Dead, NONHUMAN, and Riprap.

Je batis a roches mon langage.
(I build my language with rocks.)
-Edouard Glissant Poetic Intention

This installation sieves poetry and imagery from stories of ecological, anti-Black, anti-Working poor violence of America. Riprap is a poem constructed from language produced with a custom Recurrent Neural Network (AI). Kelley trained the AI on Muriel Rukeyser’s poem The Book of the Dead, U.S. congressional testimony on the Hawks Nest Tragedy (the mining accident referred to in The Book of the Dead), and essays by Sarah Ehlers, Saidiya Hartman, Tavia Nyong’o, Hortense Spillers, and Kathryn Yussof. Kelley co-fabulates with the AI to write new poems, at once extracting from American history, Rukeyser’s poetry, and simultaneously revising history, imagining alternative pasts and futures. The words fall like rain down two black video screens into a pile of granite stones.

The photographs consider the agency of minerals, animals, and objects amidst the traumas of humans, particularly non-white humans, objectified through slavery, colonialism, and environmental emergency by racialized capitalism.

Riprap is architectural form in which stones are laid side by side to make a water break on path or road. Beat poet Gary Snyder wrote a poem called Riprap -

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:

The score is composed with in collaboration with the Kayla McIntyre.

This project is third in the series of ongoing works Kelley has made based on the documentary poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, which in chronological order include: The Book of the Dead, NONHUMAN, and Riprap.

Je batis a roches mon langage.
(I build my language with rocks.)
-Edouard Glissant Poetic Intention

This installation sieves poetry and imagery from stories of ecological, anti-Black, anti-Working poor violence of America. Riprap is a poem constructed from language produced with a custom Recurrent Neural Network (AI). Kelley trained the AI on Muriel Rukeyser’s poem The Book of the Dead, U.S. congressional testimony on the Hawks Nest Tragedy (the mining accident referred to in The Book of the Dead), and essays by Sarah Ehlers, Saidiya Hartman, Tavia Nyong’o, Hortense Spillers, and Kathryn Yussof. Kelley co-fabulates with the AI to write new poems, at once extracting from American history, Rukeyser’s poetry, and simultaneously revising history, imagining alternative pasts and futures. The words fall like rain down two black video screens into a pile of granite stones.

The photographs consider the agency of minerals, animals, and objects amidst the traumas of humans, particularly non-white humans, objectified through slavery, colonialism, and environmental emergency by racialized capitalism.

Riprap is architectural form in which stones are laid side by side to make a water break on path or road. Beat poet Gary Snyder wrote a poem called Riprap -

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:

The score is composed with in collaboration with the Kayla McIntyre.

This project is third in the series of ongoing works Kelley has made based on the documentary poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, which in chronological order include: The Book of the Dead, NONHUMAN, and Riprap.

Je batis a roches mon langage.
(I build my language with rocks.)
-Edouard Glissant Poetic Intention

This installation sieves poetry and imagery from stories of ecological, anti-Black, anti-Working poor violence of America. Riprap is a poem constructed from language produced with a custom Recurrent Neural Network (AI). Kelley trained the AI on Muriel Rukeyser’s poem The Book of the Dead, U.S. congressional testimony on the Hawks Nest Tragedy (the mining accident referred to in The Book of the Dead), and essays by Sarah Ehlers, Saidiya Hartman, Tavia Nyong’o, Hortense Spillers, and Kathryn Yussof. Kelley co-fabulates with the AI to write new poems, at once extracting from American history, Rukeyser’s poetry, and simultaneously revising history, imagining alternative pasts and futures. The words fall like rain down two black video screens into a pile of granite stones.

The photographs consider the agency of minerals, animals, and objects amidst the traumas of humans, particularly non-white humans, objectified through slavery, colonialism, and environmental emergency by racialized capitalism.

Riprap is architectural form in which stones are laid side by side to make a water break on path or road. Beat poet Gary Snyder wrote a poem called Riprap -

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:

The score is composed with in collaboration with the Kayla McIntyre.

This project is third in the series of ongoing works Kelley has made based on the documentary poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, which in chronological order include: The Book of the Dead, NONHUMAN, and Riprap.

Je batis a roches mon langage.
(I build my language with rocks.)
-Edouard Glissant Poetic Intention

This installation sieves poetry and imagery from stories of ecological, anti-Black, anti-Working poor violence of America. Riprap is a poem constructed from language produced with a custom Recurrent Neural Network (AI). Kelley trained the AI on Muriel Rukeyser’s poem The Book of the Dead, U.S. congressional testimony on the Hawks Nest Tragedy (the mining accident referred to in The Book of the Dead), and essays by Sarah Ehlers, Saidiya Hartman, Tavia Nyong’o, Hortense Spillers, and Kathryn Yussof. Kelley co-fabulates with the AI to write new poems, at once extracting from American history, Rukeyser’s poetry, and simultaneously revising history, imagining alternative pasts and futures. The words fall like rain down two black video screens into a pile of granite stones.

The photographs consider the agency of minerals, animals, and objects amidst the traumas of humans, particularly non-white humans, objectified through slavery, colonialism, and environmental emergency by racialized capitalism.

Riprap is architectural form in which stones are laid side by side to make a water break on path or road. Beat poet Gary Snyder wrote a poem called Riprap -

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:

The score is composed with in collaboration with the Kayla McIntyre.

This project is third in the series of ongoing works Kelley has made based on the documentary poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, which in chronological order include: The Book of the Dead, NONHUMAN, and Riprap.

Je batis a roches mon langage.
(I build my language with rocks.)
-Edouard Glissant Poetic Intention

This installation sieves poetry and imagery from stories of ecological, anti-Black, anti-Working poor violence of America. Riprap is a poem constructed from language produced with a custom Recurrent Neural Network (AI). Kelley trained the AI on Muriel Rukeyser’s poem The Book of the Dead, U.S. congressional testimony on the Hawks Nest Tragedy (the mining accident referred to in The Book of the Dead), and essays by Sarah Ehlers, Saidiya Hartman, Tavia Nyong’o, Hortense Spillers, and Kathryn Yussof. Kelley co-fabulates with the AI to write new poems, at once extracting from American history, Rukeyser’s poetry, and simultaneously revising history, imagining alternative pasts and futures. The words fall like rain down two black video screens into a pile of granite stones.

The photographs consider the agency of minerals, animals, and objects amidst the traumas of humans, particularly non-white humans, objectified through slavery, colonialism, and environmental emergency by racialized capitalism.

Riprap is architectural form in which stones are laid side by side to make a water break on path or road. Beat poet Gary Snyder wrote a poem called Riprap -

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:

The score is composed with in collaboration with the Kayla McIntyre.

This project is third in the series of ongoing works Kelley has made based on the documentary poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, which in chronological order include: The Book of the Dead, NONHUMAN, and Riprap.