When you first crossed the threshold from reality into cyberspace, who was waiting to greet you? Did those figures imagine themselves as digital pioneers, or did they aspire to dwell in some self-possessed elsewhere, beyond the omniscient gaze and flimsy promises of immortality the internet dangles before us?   

In Seeking Mavis Beacon, filmmaker Jazmin Jones and their collaborator, cyber doula and fellow artist, Olivia McKayla Ross, contend with these questions among others as they demystify the origins of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, a program by The Software Toolworks released in 1987 that sold in the millions, proliferating touch-typing skills through the visage of a Black woman instructor. As Jones and Ross investigate the legacy and whereabouts of the eponymous typing teacher in this genre-expansive, pseudo-road doc, they confront an irrevocable truth: Mavis Beacon is not real.

Beacon was a digital character embodied by Haitian model Renee L’Espérance, who was paid $500 by three white tech execs for her likeness on the program’s sleeve and within the accompanying typing game—a game that ultimately grossed $400 million dollars for The Software Toolworks, making it the “number one software educational program of all time,” the company’s founder states in the documentary.

Seeking Mavis Beacon traces this history in a film that invigorates the documentary form by grounding Jones and Ross’s e-girl detective quest for Mavis/Renee in an identity-conscious conversation about navigating the digital world, then and now, as Black femme people. Seeking Mavis Beacon screened at the 2024 Blackstar Film Festival, where I spoke with Jones and Ross about Blackness in cyberspace, existing on and beyond the internet and the five years of effort that Jones, their cinematographer and partner Yelen Cohen, their sound recordist (brother-in-law Joaquin Cohen) and mother-in-law (producer Guetty Felin) put into the NEON-distributed documentary.

Jones—a Bay Area-raised video artist, editor and first-time feature filmmaker—elaborates on the distinction between Beacon and L’Espérance: “Olivia and I often talk about Mavis and Renee as two women who share a body,” they tell me. “You have the digital avatar that is Mavis Beacon, and then the real person that we can’t really know is Renee. I’ve always known that, for me, Mavis Beacon welcomed me into the digital realm. That’s why I find Olivia’s term ‘cyber doula’ to be so useful. I don’t know that I would have made so much post-internet art and spent time unpacking my relationship to cyberspace if it had not been for this introduction.”

Jones says that Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing helped them find their voice as a young person, especially “in a field that was so prime to tell me that I, as a young Black girl, was not a part of it. There’s a significance to the film taking place in Silicon Valley, too, where it’s the genesis of all of these glass ceilings.” They recall “open[ing] up this computer screen, see[ing] this beautiful field and blue sky” and experiencing “Mavis Beacon as an extension of a relative” akin to the Black women Jones grew up around.

Ross, the neologist behind cyber doula and a cyber doula herself, ed the film project after two years of its lingering in what Jones calls “grant writing purgatory.” She didn’t consider herself a filmmaker before Seeking Mavis Beacon: “My practice was mostly internet art, video art,” she says. “I was doing things with SFPC; I was doing my own research. I wasn’t thinking, like, ‘I’m gonna try and become a director.’ That was never a way I had self conceptualized. It was Jaz’s creativity and leadership that brought me into the fold.”

In the film, we witness Ross’s evolution from a former coding wunderkind into an adult intellectual with a “fugitive relationship to the academy” and an expansive vocabulary for the relationship between ourselves and our digital presence. Ross’s original concepts like “data trauma” and existing ones like “digital footprint” create specific shared vocabulary within the doc’s discourse. Jones says that throughout the runtime, they’re figuring out “all of the language that I was lacking as a child to articulate what was going on. This film is very much trying to create a glossary or a manifesto for the younger versions of Olivia and I.”

Seeking Mavis Beacon’s visually and stylistically maximalist approach cleverly simulates the levity of surfing the web while reckoning with questions of Black agency on and offline.

Cinematographer Yelen Cohen’s intimate footage of the film’s central search is cut alongside internet memes (Ross calls them “today’s folk art”), gifs, first-person interviews with digital scholars and artists (Legacy Russell, Stephanie Dinkins, Shola von Reinhold and more), the co-founders of The Software Toolworks themselves and archival imagery.

Therein lies some of Seeking Mavis Beacon’s most evident narrative strengths: its filmmakers’ willingness to engage with these anecdotal and imagined positive impacts made by Beacon, as a sort of digital ancestor, alongside the more complex, upsetting truths of L’Espérance’s mistreatment and exploitation. Yes, this avatar proliferated typing education and fostered a sense of kinship with some Black s.

Beacon also exists in a historically congruent way as a predecessor to 21st century servile fembots like Siri, Cortana and Alexa that have emerged from the imagination of white programmers like those at The Software Toolworks where, according to Ross, there “has never been a Black employee.”

How has that history influenced, if at all, L’Espérance’s choice to have virtually no digital footprint, to refuse the internet’s access to her personhood, to embody her “right to not be found” even by irers like Jones and Ross, who largely wanted to extend long-overdue flowers. Seeking Mavis Beacon is at its best when its makers are feeling into the pulse of this question, noticing it like a flickering computer cursor, with a tandem spirit of urgency and understanding.

Ross says, “It feels unsurprising that Renee is not a part of the public eye, that she’s not going around doing tours in the way that the old wizard from chess master goes to Comic Con and s. Part of me is like, ‘I wish Renee could do that.’ But then part of me is also like, ‘And what would the reception be?’ For her to even take up space in that way. Do we have the kind of tech nerds who would see that as an irable contribution?”

Jones adds, “My relationship to technology has always been one that I’ve wanted to center agency and resistance to the ways that consent is manufactured for me, in order to feel like I’m truly consenting to the ways that I’m online and the ways that I’m not online. On that level, I really ire the way that Renee’s done that. And I also wish we had an internet she felt safe on.”

ing a time before the ubiquitous, surveilling presence of the internet may feel like light work for people who once relied on telephone directories to find people they were looking for—or people who read physical copies of film essays before such artful scribbles came to be published in far-off corners of the internet.

In closing, Ross and Jones speak to their experiences of sharing their film with myriad audiences, the privilege of listening to Black femmes and the wisdom there is to be heeded from L’Espérance.

“There are very specific living room table conversations that the Black people who experience the film [are] having with each other,” Ross says. “When white people come to see the movie, it’s, ‘Take ability for your white decisions.’ There was a moment a couple years ago where everyone was talking about people using the Black hands clapping emoji as digital blackface. That conversation happened, and then people got exhausted by it. Now, we’re back to using Black trans women as reactions for funny things we see on Twitter, despite the fact that they’re constantly dying and being abused in our society, you know?”

Ross tops off her thoughts with the “hope that Black people see [Seeking Mavis Beacon] as a family reunion. I love that. ‘Black people take a seat, have fun.’ Everybody else, watch your back.”

Jazmin concludes with the ission that they and Ross are “bracing ourselves for once [Seeking Mavis Beacon] leaves living room discussion circles. What does it mean for people like Olivia and I to now become avatars of ourselves in this film? As we critique what happened, we are also enabling our audience to have parasocial relationships with us. Again, Renee is such an interesting role model in how to navigate that. So at least we have her.”