Mattaniah Aytenfsu
2026
Current Resident - Public Programming
Images: Mattaniah Aytenfsu, Take Root Among the Stars, Processing, OpenCV, TouchDesigner, 2026. Variable formats.
Mattaniah Aytenfsu is the Summer-Fall 2026 Current Resident, with a re-imagining of her pieceTake Root Among the Stars. This generative video series intertwines archival imagery and computational diagrams, reflecting on cycles of history, resilience, and the cosmic scale of humanity's journey. Drawing from the US Naval Observatory's records of solar eclipses between 1869 and 1937, the original piece merges historical moments with compass-inspired diagrams generated via code, mapping each image to Earth's orientation parameters, such as polar coordinates, on the date the photograph was captured.
This iteration extends that original work into public space. Assets from the piece have been re-cut into 11 formats and placed as online advertisements, distributed directly to phones, laptops, and tablets within a specific “geofence,” a virtual parameter around a geographic area that is used to target individuals, families, and populations with immensely granular detail.
Current Resident
As all Current Resident artists do, Aytensfu established her own geofencing.
But where geofencing typically works to stabilize a population—to identify where, exactly, people are—Aytensfu experiments with a more ephemeral form of tracking: geofencing a displacement vector rather than a single site. Take Root Among the Stars is being targeted to the phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops of people (especially black women) in Seattle’s historically black neighborhood, the Central District.
The Central District has has undergone steady gentrification since the 1990s, rapidly so since the late 2010s. Aytensfu’s work is subsequently being directed toward individuals and families who may have been displaced, over generations, from the neighborhood. This includes people who have re-settled in places like Rainier Valley, Rainier Beach, Skyway, Burien, and SeaTac.
“I’m drawn to how Butler treats displacement as something you build from, not just something that happened to you.”
The title of Aytensfu’s work comes from a line in Octavia Butler's seminal novel, Parable of the Sower (1993). Butler moved to Seattle in 1999 and lived in Lake Forest until her death in 2006; the book was the 2024 selection of the Seattle Public Library’s series, “Seattle Reads.” The novel imagines survival in a world in which its protagonist, displaced from a home destroyed by drought and violence, has to build a new belief system and community from the ground up rather than wait to return to what was lost.
The novel informed Aytensfu’s approach to geofencing. “The title actually comes from a line in the book,” she explains, “and I'm drawn to how Butler treats displacement as something you build from, not just something that happened to you.”
Geofencing and location-based ad targeting are tools built to track displacement for profit—to follow people as they move through gentrifying cities and sell that movement back to advertisers. Aytensfu repurposes this machinery toward a different end. Delivered as ordinary ad units in the feeds and browsers of daily life, Take Root Among the Stars reaches people on the very infrastructure that tracks and targets them by location. But rather than exploiting displacement, can geofencing and, by extension, Aytensfu’s work, reconnect a community despite and across geography?
If you live in 98122, 98144, 98118, 98178, and 98168 you may see Aytensfu’s work on your devices. Screenshot and tag us on Instagram! @blackembodiments
About Mattaniah Aytenfsu
Mattaniah Aytenfsu is a new media artist, designer, and engineer based in Brooklyn, NY. Her interdisciplinary practice explores the interplay of computation, consciousness, and expression.
Using code as her primary medium, Aytenfsu creates generative artifacts and experiences that demystify technology and reveal its humanistic potential. Her work seeks to externalize the internal, empowering individuals to reflect on their inner worlds, their communities, and the ecosystems they inhabit.
Her work has been presented at Sundance Film Festival and Gray Area, supported by the New Museum, and featured in publications such as Forbes and Refinery29. Mattaniah currently works as a Creative Technologist at Le Truc (Publicise Groupe), exploring emerging technologies and building concept-driven digital experiences. She is a currently a member of NEW INC Year 12 cohort.
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About Current Resident
Current Resident is a public art project is inspired by the data collection and distribution processes of direct mail services used to solicit new customers—the "Current Resident" in-print mailers are typically addressed to.
The Black Embodiments Studio purchases ad space in the same glossy, colorful direct mail packets that residents already receive every week with the goal of generating unexpected moments of encounter with black artists and their works. In the process we aim to push the practice of “public art” and the idea that “art should be accessible” to their limits. What if we simply sent free black art to as many people as possible?
The 2025-2026 iteration of the project focuses on digital marketers, placing black art in online ad spaces to interrupt our daily scrolling in positive ways. What does it mean to intervene into devices and spaces that are typically used for work, for hyperconsumption, for doomscrolling, for escapism? What does it look and feel like to experience free black art during everyday scrolling?
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