Digital collectives in the carceral era: Introducing Abolition Now

Abolition as countervisual archive

Importantly, AN is intended to be a countervisual space (Mirzoeff, 2011). AN provides room to study the visual language and scale of abolition. We take seriously that abolition itself is a sophisticated worldwide visual set of codes that operates against an ocular carceral and militarized system that, under racial capitalism, has subsumed every social need. Abolition, in some form, is visible in every part of the world, scrawled across its walls and proliferating every second, as it is continuously reborn in the digital entanglements of social media and the unfolding of historical events. Grounded in the critical relevance of cultural work to the development of political strategy and movement organizing, we take up Stuart Hall's call and ask: “What does it mean to take seriously, at our present conjuncture, the thought that cultural politics and questions of culture, of discourse, and of metaphor are absolutely deadly political questions?” (Hall, 1997: 289–290). AN seeks to open up room for a continuous critical discourse about authoritarian and carceral regimes of representation, by holding space for the labor and creation of rapid response and long-term movement artists who are otherwise disappeared from or intentionally misinterpreted by mainstream media, official archives, and politics.

AN is an attempt to hold space for us to ask how certain meanings under particular historical conditions become more or less legitimate or illegitimate, legible or illegible as representations of reality, and for and by whom. It does this by centering those visuals that oppose and disrupt common sense assumptions, even if momentarily, about crime and punishment at work in the dominant social order. Abolitionist images, with their punch and punctum, express the possibility to locate the contradictions within carceral institutions, to open up political and social possibilities for contesting racial capitalism and furthering the capacity of students, organizers, and others to question oppressive forms of authority and the operations of carceral power. By engaging the nature of particular struggles over specific representations, AN asks how particular identifications/identities, forms of agency and solidarity, and notions of difference and community are produced (Táíwò, 2022). It pushes us to consider what means of autonomy, self-determination, and collective power building are (still) available: What do we need to put the carceral state in crisis—what contradictions allow strategic intervention? (Gilmore, 2024). How might we read the world for the fissures and cracks in the carceral state?

We also borrow heavily from visual criminology's attention to countervisuality. We take seriously how ways of seeing are foundational to social orders. Indeed, visuality, the manner in which history is authorized, depends upon both quotidian and spectacular forms of state violence being rendered as unseeable or illegible—the classic police officer's utterance: “Move along. Nothing to see here” (Mirzoeff, 2011). In our own hypermediatized landscape, it asks, more significantly, how do we move beyond looking, which, as McClanahan writes in his definitive primer on visual criminology, is all we can ever seemingly do within the constraints of state, carceral, and militarized occupational violence (2021). This work operates “to mask the inherent violence of states in a vocabulary that leaves intact the very logics, infrastructures and institutions necessary for the violence to occur in the first place” (Schept, 2016: 601). Abolition, as a countervisual space, seeks to shift the terms on how we see and read the images, the orders, the world around us. Like AN, it offers a view into visceral politics, widespread suffering, and interlocking crises (Hayward, 2010; Linnemann, 2022; Linnemann and Wall, 2013). It is its own kind of “reckless eyeballing,” a “looking at” that is prohibited through regimes of racialized and sexualized violence (Mirzoeff, 2011: 482) because it incites critical thinking about the operations of power. Countervisuality is anchored in a claim to a right to look that is open-ended, mutual, reciprocated—we are seen. It is the foundational right to exist and not be disappeared (Mirzoeff, 2011). And it demands, in its dismantling and undoing, always a remaking of the world (Chua, 2020; Coyle and Scott, 2021; Gilmore, 2022; Heynen and Ybarra, 2021; Kaba, 2021; Kaba and Richie, 2022).

For visual criminologists then, countervisuality is the critical space of practice in which we seek to unsee prisons and police, capital and empire (Schept, 2014). This practice of en- and unvisioning manifests as a politics of proliferation in the archive, where the sheer mass of images confronting censored worldviews plays a profoundly important role in our understanding of abolition's limits and possibilities.

Project features

A set of principles and features define our efforts to make AN—and the image—a usable entry point into the study of abolition: first, AN centers artists by featuring short and long-form documentary interviews with featured contributors (Micah Bazant, Nicole Fleetwood, Lacy Hale, Ashley Hunt, Ricardo Levins Morales, Monica Trinidad, Jakeli Swimmer, DeLesslin "Roo" George-Warren, and many more). They describe why they made specific pieces, their themes, historical contexts, their goals and political analysis, and popular response and re-uses. An archive from below, AN, in this way, is vetted by artists themselves who engage in critical reflection on their practice. In long form interviews, scholars like artist Ashley Hunt and curator Nicole Fleetwood explain the significance of deep time considerations of image work, political thought, theory, and cultural memory. In shorter vignettes, we learn how artists create rapid responses to fascism or state violence, resulting in cascades of protest art relevant to the current moment. Through their work, artists help to empower people to make political demands like Stop Nazi Scum, Stop Cop City, NoDAPL, CloseRikers, and No Letcher Prison. They help humanize entry points into understanding the “why” of these campaigns. AN's artists demonstrate the ability to distill complex issues into a succinct message and make dense or radical concepts digestible. Some transform photos, video, and previous texts to enhance the original image and capture the viewer's imagination in new ways, often by applying movement history and ancestral wisdom to present crises. This temporal work is thematic across movement artists’ corpus of work, as key quotes from movement leaders and the directly impacted surface and resurge time again in the wake of state violence. In following the origins of the artist's work, we find “eventful” photos and historical and cultural references from previous freedom and liberation movements. In an era defined by viral reproductions, AN shows the long life or durée of an image, often removed in physical and digital preservation practices. We trace how people re-use and repurpose movement art by including edits and adaptations of key pieces across time and in various media formats, such as event posters, book covers, billboards, clothing, buttons, and social media re-use.

As one example, AN includes an interview with Minneapolis organizer and artist Ricardo Levins Morales’ Trayvon Martin—Black Mothers’ Sons. In his interview with AN, Morales explained his inspiration for the piece came from the photo of Trayvon Martin that widely circulated after his killing, in which Trayvon's hoodie became a media focal point of racialized dangerousness. In grays and deep blues, Morales created a portrait of Trayvon shrouded in his luminous hoodie that envisions a future without the killing of Black children by invoking specific historical demands. It circulated globally across social media at the time of Martin's death and resurfaces when another police killing occurs. The image has become a resurgent icon of the long struggle of Black mothers seeking justice for their murdered children and a call for action among communities that have been radically disorganized by mass incarceration. Morales described making the image in a single night after a Black Lives Matter event in Minneapolis that would later result in the founding of several abolitionist collectives. MPD150, Reclaim the Block, Black Visions Collective, and others assumed the world stage in their fight for abolition in the aftermath of George Floyd's killing. Morales powerfully recounted receiving messages of thanks from all over the world, including from Trayvon's brother, who requested a signed copy of the print (Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

“Trayvon Martin–Ella Baker” by Puerto Rican artist and cultural organizer: Ricardo Levins Morales, interviewed in AN.

Temporal refrains like Another World is Possible, There Was A Time Before Police And There Will Be a Time After, and In Our Free Future open windows into the collective desire for abolitionist futures. Kah Yangni explained their role as a movement artist in relationship to organizing for abolitionist future in this way:

I like abolitionists because even if I'm stressed about the How can this really practically happen, they're the people who care about teenagers that make mistakes. They're the people who think that tons of black men shouldn't be in jail. They're the people talking about how there is a connection between people not having enough and then going into a life where they have to take things because they don't have it. I feel like that's more my relationship to the work. My main attitude has been there's something in me that's good at imagining the feeling of what would happen if we got the fantasy, and making images of it. And then other people are very good at taking that and using it. That feels good to me. Feels like something I can do. And it is really, really exciting. I think it's wild and cool to see that resonating with other people who are dreaming and working in other places like, that's amazing. I'm an artist, and I'm kind of like a baby organizer, and I feel like I know that I don't have the reading and don't have the knowledge, and sometimes don't have as much of the faith. But I think that the art pairs well with people who are very good at it, and I think for me and my learning it's good to be around the Mariame Kabas and other people who are very good at the thinking. They have faith. I feel like their faith feeds me. I keep making the work we can work together to like, talk about these ideas and like, put them out there. ¹

As Yangni explains, they sometimes feel their art is “ahead of them as a person” (Figure 3). Artists do not always have to be where the art is for the work to take on a life of its own, in ways the artist cannot always control. Like Yangni, other artists like Morales have questions about the term “abolition.” Despite these questions, artists simultaneously describe letting go of their egos to be of service to organizations, movements, and the greater goal of reducing peoples’ contact with carceral systems. As Indigenous scholar Kency Cornejo suggests, we practice a form of visual disobedience that “senses and enunciates…how to produce alternative ways of seeing that are incomprehensible to colonialism and empire—ways of seeing that defy the heavy cloak of colonization by piercing through it with insubordinate existence and love for oneself and one's communities” (2024: 16). It takes time and space to unsee empire, carcerality, and capital, an unseeing which AN practices in what it provides and protects.

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Figure 3.

“In Our Free Future” screenshot; Kah Yangni, interviewed in AN.

AN's images and interviews are complemented with study guides that deepen the contextual understanding of abolition and social movements through the collection's holdings. Commentaries, scholarly references, lectures, and related works are curated alongside artist biographies to provide access points into the study of abolition and illuminate its histories, tensions, and uses. For instance, provocative themes, such as anti-policing ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards) or FTP (Fuck the Police) images, are linked to key pieces by state violence scholars such as Wall and McClanahan's “‘Little wars with the police’: Aesthetic arsenals and intellects of insult” (2025), Neocleous's A Critical Theory of Police Power (2021), or Nicholas Mirzoeff's “The Right to Look” (2011). The study guides reflect what is already in the art, pulling out details from within to amplify the potential for abolitionist study (Figure 4).

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Figure 4.

Screenshot: “Under the Burning Cop Cars” by Interference Archive co-founder Josh MacPhee, interviewed in AN.

Through metadata cued to abolitionist principles, AN trains contributors to code its collection so that viewers can explore key artists, subjects, mediums, visual motifs, and slogans, as well as geographies, dates, and people central to the era of new abolition. Metadata creates searchability that allows the user to look closely via deep zoom functions while making structural and analytic connections between pieces in the collection and the larger context and visual history of social movements. AN maps abolition's pre-conditions from racial, labor, disability, reproductive, housing, youth, restorative, and transformative justices. Inevitably, we encounter the carceral universe of militarization, police, punishment, mass incarceration, death, and destruction. But worlding images seek out new social relations and futures against policing and punishment. They counter the carceral convention. Images follow fugitive lines of decolonization, resistance, reparations, remembrance, love, laughter, solidarity, healing, accountability, safety, defense, and hope. In creating a digital portal to abolition, we sought to reflect back a rich, vast, and growing world of subjects.

Recurrent visual elements “show up” perennially across abolition movement images. Butterflies, fire, flora, pigs, bars, handcuffs, razor wire, hoodies, police cars, snakes, water, and more symbols constitute a shared visual vocabulary across global geographies. With limited space, movement artists and organizers carefully select succinct, meaningful phrases that “pack a punch.” Over time, people recycle these catchphrases and symbols in the wake of state violence, intertextually reusing symbols and remixing slogans to visualize worlds we grieve and envision (Figure 5).

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Figure 5.

“Build Communities, Not Prisons” by Lacy Hale for the building communities not prisons coalition, interviewed in AN.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the demands that define our era, echoed across the world in image form. The work of featured artists like Lacy Hale demonstrates how a mantra blossoms into a slogan for the masses, as she describes her work with No Hate in My Holler. Slogans are the language of the masses, and the visual powerfully intersects with social movements’ most emphatic declarations: Build Community, Not Prisons. We Charge Genocide. Stop Cop City. Cops Out of Schools. Abolish ICE. Free Them All.

AN is a foundationally a space in which we can see, and practice unseeing, unlearning, and unbecoming punitive and carceral worlds, including police, prisons, empire, and more. We know one person, one artwork, one generation alone will not topple capacious state power. Without overemphasizing the potential of any singular artwork to serve as a social catalyst, the process of art making as a means to build relationships encapsulates aspects of the transformative. Interviews with artists, organizers, and curators reveal that the process and relationality of art—of talking with its creators, of asking genealogical and contextual questions about the image, of producing art itself, of creative praxis are just as powerful, if not moreso, than the product itself. The viewer/student/organizer/scholar/curator then pursues their own forms of analysis—what does this relationality reveal? What themes, motifs, conditions for production and distribution, historical antecedents shape how we understand the project of abolition. What entry points into this work might they find?

AN is a living space, necessarily unfinished, where we invite users and collectives to fill in missing pieces of information and contribute their own art, found images, and study guides via a flexible technological infrastructure to incorporate new contributions. AN democratizes its digital infrastructure by utilizing Internet Archive to hold and provide the project's artistic media. Users with access can contribute material and relative metadata to a scoped collection (Abolition Now: Images for study and struggle) in Internet Archive, which immediately makes this information universally accessible for people and computing systems. AN draws from the Internet Archive collection using International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), which is an open standard for delivering high-quality attributed digital objects online at scale. It too is a collaborative space, sometimes running slower than other commercial forms. The lag or hiccups in the AN site at times then is intentional, a commitment to participatory patience.

Using this provided content, the open-source static site generator Canopy-IIIF, that is designed for discovery-focused digital scholarship and collections, builds the static website abolitionimages.org. AN extends the collection as it exists in the Internet Archive, ensuring long-term sustainability of source material, and allowing further contextualization of this material through user-friendly creation of study guides. AN uses Canopy-IIIF's functions such as deep image zooming, video streaming and progressive downloads, seamless creation of thematic context, robust search capabilities, language accessibility, submission pathways, and more. Canopy-IIIF empowers participants to adapt content for creating digital scholarship sites or exhibits, and facilitate web deployment that is statically generated and serverless in operation. With each image, a growing genealogy of abolition in the carceral era can be traced and produced collectively. This participatory aspect is built into the digital infrastructure of the project space.

Collaborative design and critical data ethics

The design and implementation of the digital AN platform is guided by the principles of collaboration, equitable access, and liberatory politics modeled by the art and artists of new abolition movements. Cognizant of the many issues regarding datafication, in particular for people of color (Gallon et al., 2019), the artists, organizers, and curators featured in AN employ subversive uses of technology aimed at disrupting these misrepresentations. Data ordinarily meant to track users is transformed into a map tracing the many lives of an insurrectionary image, resisting the decontextualization of digital representations through descriptive metadata, interviews with the artists, related images discovery sliders, and study guides. Descriptive metadata outside of standardized ontologies invites users to become critical producers of data and “facilitate autonomy, agency, self-determination, and self-identification” (Carbajal, 2021). Pathways for the community to submit materials, while retaining ownership of their materials, and participatory metadata practices strive to make the platform and its data post-custodial.

By moving beyond the rigid confines of standardized ontologies, descriptive metadata becomes a powerful tool for ethical engagement and community. Traditional systems, such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings, often perpetuate historical biases and impose external, sometimes harmful, labels upon communities, a practice that reflects a custodial mindset where the institution dictates meaning. When a project relies solely on standardized ontologies, it centralizes descriptive authority within the institution. The power to name and define is the power to exist on one's own terms, making this approach a fundamental component of data justice and ethical archival practice. As a digital project, AN follows the models of other post-custodial projects leveraging the technological and economic resources of the university to center communities as creators and custodians of their heritage. AN borrows practices on the use of personal data, data integrity, and boundaries for data access and sharing from grassroots public digital projects like the Colored Conventions Project and Chicana por mi Raza, as well as institutional initiatives like the Penn State University's Center for Black Digital Research #DigBlk, and the Black Health Heritage Data Lab at Johns Hopkins University. These digital projects balance the urgent need to amplify underrepresented voices in the digital cultural record while also mitigating the historical and contemporary forms that devalue and exploit the specific communities represented in their data. AN is also informed by the contributions made by the coalitions responsible for the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance, guiding how AN describes and interacts with data to promote “collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility, and ethics” (Global Indigenous Data Alliance).

With these models in mind, we prominently feature clear, accessible statements and communications, intentionally stripped of technical jargon, to inform all users and the general public about how their data is respectfully collected, managed, and utilized. Furthermore, we provide direct and responsive channels for contacting team members to discuss any issues, from content inquiries to ethical concerns. Any contributor may request the complete removal of their art, all representations of their work, and any related data at any time. This is a formal, transparent, and streamlined procedure clearly outlined on the platform to ensure requests are honored promptly and without friction. In doing so, we consciously steer away from the extractive and often violent legacy of traditional archives, which historically served to surveil and simultaneously exclude the communities they claimed to represent. Our vision of ethical data use, through our post-custodial model, is geared toward redistributing power in the digital cultural record. Furthermore, we understand ethical data use as part of the necessary decentering of the university's role in the project with the eventual goal of establishing the artists, interested publics, and any other groups collaborating with AN as the primary drivers of the project's future.

AN ultimately is envisioned as a participatory and lively space. It is a classroom, lab, workshop, organizing locus, study space, gallery, database, and documentary record. It models digital participatory politics in its digital design, data ethics, commitment to training students and community to collect research, create study materials, and talk with artists and organizers about their work. Workshops and class projects can contribute to it in real time, following abolition themes around world events, documenting those images and artists, and contextualizing their work within structural forms of violence and the long arc of emancipation. We also imagined it early on as simply a space of respite and rest, from the onslaught of daily algorithmic media flows in politically volatile and fascist spaces. It holds space for what is not visible in mainstream media and political discourse…for all of us whose relationships and visions of abolition are largely unseen. Here you can just look at the image, sit with it, listen to the artist, without the need to scroll or process vast information loads. In this sense, there is a love letter quality of AN to the perennially exhausted activist scholars, students, artists, and movement workers of our era…a place to stop and see one's self, one's work.