What does it mean to design your own image within systems never built to see you?

The inaugural issue of Deep Cuts investigates Black Avatar as both proxy and provocation — a vessel for selfhood, memory, transformation, and play. Through the intersecting worlds of AI, gaming, wearable tech, and digital archives, artists and technologists reimagine identity beyond inherited defaults.

Drawing on Octavia Butler’s call to “make your own worlds,” this issue examines digital selfhood as both a site of creativity and consumption—where aesthetic codes, cultural signals, and market systems converge. From Curry J. Hackett’s reflections on Black futurity and urban design to conversations on data bias, visibility, and algorithmic erasure, Black Avatar interrogates how technology replicates, distorts, and redefines what it means to be seen.

As AI reshapes creation and communication, Black Avatar asks: Who builds the tools that build us — and what futures become possible when we do?