By Emily Nguyen

In a world that is fueled by technological advancement, access to computer programming and digital art is still limited, “favoring white men over people of color,” says a UC Santa Barbara educator in art and technology.

Masood Kamandy, a 41-year-old Afghan American artist, seeks to expose social disparities within computing. Kamandy is in his second year of the Media Arts and Technology Graduate Program working to attain his Ph.D. as a Eugene-Cota Robles Fellow. He also teaches in the Department of Art at UCSB and at Pasadena City College.

As a member of the LBGTQIA+ community, Kamandy is sensitive to social discrimination, including reduced access to resources and gender disparities within academic settings. He is researching underrepresented minority groups in order to make the field of art and technology more equitable. 

Masood Kamandy in 2005 at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Photography Department that he established at Kabul University. Facilities within this department consist of black and white darkrooms and brand new classrooms equipped with photography apparatus donated and purchased in New York City.

Kamandy is a graphic artist with a strong background in fine arts, color, and photography. In addition to teaching in California he has been an educator abroad at Kabul University in Afghanistan. There, he built a photography school and designed art programs. In a recent interview Kamandy discussed his interest in computer art and the barriers facing minorities in the field.

What is your Ph.D. research project in the MAT Graduate Program about?

The goal of my research is to make computing more democratic. If only a certain number or type of person has access to the revolutionary power of computing, it does humanity a huge disservice. For example, if you look at the demographics of the field of computer science in industry or academia, it's skewed very heavily toward straight, white, men. Of course, nothing against the people who have succeeded in the industry. The problem is that other populations are suppressed unnaturally. The more voices that are at the table, people of color, Latino, Black, Asian, disabled people, the better everything becomes. All my research goes toward making that a reality and hopefully influencing the field to be a little bit more equitable. 

Do you believe your background in the LGBTQIA+ community has influenced your work and creative process?

This has given me a kind of sensitivity to differences in marginalized communities and injustices in the world. It has made me more aware about things that might need to be changed. It gives me the drive to make computing better and complete my research every day.

In 2002, you traveled to Kabul, Afghanistan and started a photography program at Kabul University in the midst of a war. What ignited your desire to do so despite the violence?

I was always really passionate about education. When I was an undergrad, 9/11 happened. I was in New York. I started to become very aware of my family's country, Afghanistan, and I needed to do something to help. The situation there was terrible. I can't even estimate how many people have died there in the last 30 years. At first, I started collecting cameras and then the school in Kabul started this auction that raised $100,000 to send me to Afghanistan to build a school. I was 22.  It was a really huge moment for me because it got me interested in education. I ended up going back and forth for two years. I built a photography school, taught the first photography classes, and trained professors. It was a great exercise of leadership early on.

Masood Kamandy teaches photography and color in Kabul as a part of the dOCUMENTA exhibition in Kassel, Germany in 2013.

What was your biggest takeaway from Kabul during your time there from 2002-2005?

Living in a war zone, you start to see the pressures that don’t exist here. I could have never predicted what would happen… it wasn’t safe. In Afghanistan, men tend to get everything. When I was able to get the opportunity to give back to this community by starting the photography program, I tried to focus on educating men and women equally. It wasn’t a very popular thing for me to be doing. I ended up pressuring them to create a women's only photography class. Women did not take it for granted and felt grateful for the experience. After that, I was offered by the University's Women’s Computer Lab, a dedicated room solely for women to use the computers, to come and teach Photoshop.

After Kabul, how did you continue pursuing your career as an educator and mentor?

After Kabul, I wanted to serve my local community [here]. Working in a city college is different; there is no gatekeeping. They let everyone in. It makes professors much more compassionate and aware of disabled student needs, working students, and so on. I tried to think about how my students can be successful. Initially at Pasadena City College, I created the Design, Media, Art department and certificates that allow students to learn coding in the context of an art department, which is something that didn’t exist before. 

Before taking on photography and mentoring as hobbies, you had a strong background in fine arts. Tell us about your art portfolio and which work means the most to you.

In my graduate thesis project exhibition called ‘Superpositional,’ I dump pictures into a processing software and the pixels combine to generate a new image. That software and exhibition was chosen to be in ‘dOCUMENTA,’ in 2013, a world-wide exhibition that happens every five years in Germany. The curators of ‘dOCUMENTA’ paid for me to travel back to Afghanistan to work with students 10 years after my original trip and to have my work exhibited in Kabul. This was nice, it was like it came full circle. I saw some old students and went to teach back in the same department a decade later. That was one of my favorite projects.

Why do you think your class, Computer Programming for the Arts, is essential for UCSB?

Computing is really interdisciplinary. What I teach in the coding class gives you the foundational programming knowledge, but it's all rooted in art. Students learn how computers read images, different image formats, and more. When students leave this class, they have a portfolio. I think that's really different from the way that computer science is taught. In computer science, you need to write programs correctly. It is treated very much like a math course, whereas for my class, there is not necessarily a right answer. It’s an exploration and you're using the computer as a tool. 

Emily Nguyen is a third year student at UC Santa Barbara who is majoring in Biology major and minoring Art & Technology minor. She wrote this article for her Writing Program course Digital Journalism.