My Hands / Wishful Thinking

"Working within the early netart aesthetic of the popup, hypertext, and digital automation of sound, my hands/wishful thinking produces an online memorial to the tragic death of Amadou Diallo, a twenty-two year old immigrant from Guinea who was shot forty-one times based on a case of mistaken identity and police overreaction in 1999. In this piece by Mendi and Keith Obadike, the blinking, repeating hand of Keith Obadike grasps a wallet purchased from the same store on 125th street in Harlem where Diallo worked. Perhaps this is even the same brand of wallet that Diallo held which the NYPD claimed was a gun. Recalling experimental photographs like Glenn Ligon's Hands (1996), my hands/wishful thinking draws together the hand of the artist, the hand of Diallo, and the hand of the user navigating the web page. Mendi and Keith Obadike begin with the premise that 'thoughts are things' and for every shot fired a thought has been written down as an act of poetic resistance. Released in an age before social media, my hands/wishful thinking exemplifies the transformative potential of the Internet at the turn of the millennium. Rather than an expression of trauma, loss, and violence, this deeply moving work of netart activism places hope in the power of collectivity and a future without racist violence." -- from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 3