Through digital manipulation, the Manifest Destiny paintings—those romanticized visions of westward expansion that justified the violent seizure of Native American lands under the guise of divine providence—transform into patterns evoking Indigenous textile traditions. These become the foundation of ‘Coded Frontier.’ This visual transformation creates a palimpsest where colonial imagery becomes the ground for Indigenous-inspired pattern-making, a connection that strives to honor both the original stewards of the land and the Navajo women who worked at Fairchild Semiconductor.

There, they meticulously assembled integrated circuits for early computing devices through what became known as ‘electrical weaving.’ Their labor was fundamental to revolutionary technologies including the Apollo mission guidance systems and the first personal computers, yet they received little recognition. The piece employs subtle text blanching to mirror how Indigenous contributions are often hidden beneath dominant narratives of technological progress (e.g., Silicon Valley myth-making), the fissures encouraging viewers to question this facade.

Yellow classification boxes and network structures swarm across the installation, visually representing how AI vision systems attempt to categorize and divide cultural artifacts and landscapes. These digital boundaries mirror colonial territory-making. The pixelated nodes function as a dual visual metaphor, simultaneously representing computational neural networks and viral particles—the latter alluding to diseases that accompanied colonial expansion, some deliberately transmitted through textiles.

As artificial intelligence increasingly shapes our understanding of place and space, we must examine how technology perpetuates these colonial epistemologies. By juxtaposing these elements with Indigenous textile patterns and Western landscape imagery, the work invites viewers to consider how AI systems—trained predominantly on Western datasets—may perpetuate such harm when encountering non-Western cultural expressions.

The piece further illuminates how technological power concentrates in the hands of the few—represented by the outstretched, Renaissance-style hand in the upper left corner—while extracting from the Global Majority. This creates not only dependencies but cycles of exploitation, extraction, classification, erasure, and domination that echo historical patterns of colonization.

In ‘Digital Manifest,’ these elements converge into perpetual motion. In exhibitions, this component is presented as a free-standing acrylic video print that plays the 18-second video continuously. This format with its never-ending loop underscores colonialism’s cyclical nature as it persists in new technological forms.