The Medium and the Message: Arthur Jafa’s “I Am Tony”

November 9, 2026

Uncategorized

Getting With the Times

Science fiction has always had the ability to seemingly predict the technology of the future while transcribing the issues of the past. Gene Youngblood’s 1970 book titled Expanded Cinema exists in that same lane without being fiction at all. Writing at the precipice of what cinema could become, Youngblood speaks of a developing world of dissolving screens, immersive environments, and technology as an extension of human consciousness. As genius as his prediction was, it was also incomplete. As he posited this new cybernetic-human consciousness to the world, he never considered the double consciousness that is ingrained in the Black experience. This blind spot left in the midst of Youngblood’s musings gives way to the genius that is artist, cinematographer, sculptor, and filmmaker Arthur Jafa. Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema provides the methodology, while Jafa’s “Affective Proximity” gives us the technique.

In Expanded Cinema, Gene Youngblood argues that the electronic media and computer visuals that were in their early stages were forming a cybernetic human consciousness. He ultimately argues that as these technologies develop, they pave the way for a two-way relationship between the viewer and the media. This includes participatory installations, multi-media performances, and immersive environments. Fifty years later, Youngblood’s prediction is more realized than ever. We don’t just watch on more screens, faster, on phones and streams; with AI and editing software, anyone can alter an image to fit the story they want told.

I am tony

A couple weeks ago I visited the New Museum to see Arthur Jafa’s US museum survey exhibition, “I am Tony.” The exhibit captured some of his work spanning a 40-year career.

Jafa is hailed as one of the most influential artists of his generation, but as we walked through the space, all we could say was that this guy would’ve loved Tumblr. Notebooks filled with images from magazines, cut out or printed, were arranged much like your favorite Tumblr page.

Starting on the fourth floor and heading down, the first room you enter is completely black, rejecting the traditional white walls adorned with framed pieces arranged for attendees to follow. I wish I could ask him directly how much of a role he played in the orientation of the room and flow-through versus the curators of the exhibit. Immediately, you are confronted with the fact that you are exploring musings of an undeniably black artist, a black mind, and, at points, his prediction of a black future.

Arthur Jafa is a fascinating case study of the future of artistic expression that Youngblood predicted. Jafa borrows the design infrastructure embedded in the technology we use and repurposes it to create and investigate new meaning. We were in there for 2 hours, and the variation from physical sculptures, collages, and films made it clear this was only what the space could fit and not the full breadth of his work. The computer-generated films, the montage footage from classic American cinema, and the physical sculptures point to an experiential exhibit that engages the increasingly attention-deficit mind. His work is the African American expansion of Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema.

The dynamic between art and the viewer has always been dialogical, as viewers make their interpretations of whatever is put in front of them. Jafa’s affective proximity and Black artistic perspective push that viewer-and-art dynamic to its natural evolution as both technology and the speed of image consumption accelerate.

One of Jafa’s most discussed works, also featured at the exhibit, is BG, a 73-minute film, which at its core is the roughly seven-minute massacre scene from Taxi Driver, altered and added to, playing on a loop. Each pass through the bloody climax is slightly but crucially different. Jafa cast a new actor as the pimp Keitel originally played, wove the new footage into the original, and rerecorded the voices. While the actual Taxi Driver ended with Bickle killing white men (a pimp, a hotel timekeeper, and a mafioso client), Jafa calls out the underlying racist tension of the scene and chooses to digitally alter them to be Black.

In an interview, Schrader revealed that this was the original choice for the film, but in the end he and Scorsese cast them as white.

“I was involved in that decision,” Schrader said. “It wasn’t in the script. It was just taken for granted that pimps in New York are all black.

And [Daniel] Melnick who ran it at Columbia said, ‘we’re going to have an incident in a theatre if you do this. If, at the end, Travis just goes and starts killing all the Black people—and only Black people—something’s going to happen. And it only takes one incident in a theatre to kill a film’.”

https://a-rabbitsfoot.com/editorial/confessions/making-sport-white-paul-schrader-on-taxi-driver/

Here we see how one of the most iconic films in American cinema is layered with the subtext of racism. When the studio made Sport white, it was, to borrow Stuart Hall’s terms, encoding the film. The choice controlled what audiences would see in that final massacre, so they would read Bickle as a lonely antihero and not as a man killing Black people. Race was written out of the preferred reading. Jafa decodes the film against that reading. He picks up the assumption the studio buried and encodes it back into the footage. What sat underneath the film becomes the film itself. And because the scene loops, you can’t settle into the comfortable reading. Each time the massacre restarts, you have to decode it again. He puts it directly in front of your face and makes clear the reality of the prejudiced archive that we applaud and hold with such reverence all these years later.

Youngblood was right. Media did become our environment. I just saw a post on Twitter lamenting how social media is everything to some people. In this day and age, where even some of the simplest material joys are behind paywalls, how can we really fault people for leaning into the phone that’s in their hands? We don’t sit in front of a screen anymore; we carry it, scroll it, and wake up to it. Every day we take in more images than any generation before us. Some are old, some are new, and these days a growing number of them are made with a prompt. And like Taxi Driver, every one of those images was encoded by someone, with something in mind.

The tools for remaking images are now in everyone’s hands, but the skill of reading them is disappearing. Across all platforms exist those pages made up purely of “vibes.” They are descendants of those Tumblr pages Jafa would’ve loved, curating vibes off recycled images without ever asking where those images came from or what they were built to do. We save them, repost them, and move on with the swipe of a finger. When an image is reduced to an aesthetic, its subtext doesn’t go away. It just goes unread, and it keeps shaping how we see the world without our noticing.

That is why I believe Jafa’s work is getting the overdue recognition it deserves now. Affective proximity as a practice can be a useful and productive pause to the endless scroll. It means staying with an image long enough to ask what it means, who it was made for, who it was made against, and whether it means anything at all. Black Americans have always had to read this way, decoding a culture that was never encoded with us in mind. Jafa turns that survival skill into an art form, and in a world flooded with images, it may be the most important way of looking we have.