Afrofuturism & Computation: Coding the Future
At the turn of the 20th century, Professor Hannibal Johnson presented his invention called a “Megascope” to the main protagonist and his wife in “The Princess Steel,” a short-story written by W.E.B. DuBois. In 1971, Amiri Baraka proposed a more humanistic technology or the “expression-scriber”:
which I could step & sit or sprawl or hang & use not only my fingers to make words express feelings but elbows, feet, head, behind, and all the sounds I wanted, screams, grunts, taps, itches… the xpression, three dimensional–able to be touched, or tasted or felt, or entered, or heard or carried like a speaking singing constantly communicating charm.
Du Bois’ “Megascope” and Baraka’s “expression-scriber” existed mainly in the authors’ imaginations. However, these (and other) design fictions served as guideposts for what was to come alongside the emergence of the Do-It-Yourself maker movement. In his book “Flame Wars,” Mark Dery explored the work of Rammellzee and described his “Computator” sound system/b-boy costume. Instead of hanging from golden strings (Du Bois), the cyborg-like extensions are now 3D printed and worn on the body. Onyx Ashanti’s device has the ability to generate sounds through movement with his self-made exo-skeleton and a self-programmed language called “Meta Bit.”
Ayodamola Okunseinde’s “Afrofuturist Lantern” is an ambient data storytelling device. Stephanie Dinkins’ “Not the Only One” or N’TOO is an artificial intelligence storyteller that repurposes text from Toni Morrison’s “Sula” and the artist’s family interviews in order to answer users’ questions. Dinkins recruited coders and creative technologists to build her robot.
And now this no longer exists solely in the speculative. This is real world Afrofuturism or as Dinkins calls it: Afro-NOWism.
This is a promising development and one I’ve been exploring through music (ex. James Brown), imaging and digital fabrication. I was recently commissioned by Slate magazine to write a response piece to Cory Doctorow’s “Affordances”. My essay, “Not Just a Number”, explores how artists like Dinkins, Okunseinde and Ashanti are countering repressive and oppressive aspects of technology through activism, art, and education.
The heroes of “Affordances” are the people who rediscover their humanity and take control of it.
Writing the essay led to an invite to discuss this development at New America’s “Humanities+Tech” event next month. I will be on a panel that includes Illah Nourbakhsh (robotics professor at CMU and director of the CREATE Lab) and representatives from the National Humanities Center (NHC), the Fred Rogers Center, and local innovators.
Late last year, Alondra Nelson moderated a panel with Nona Hendryx, George Clinton, and Vernon Reid, at the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum. Sonic Futures: The Music of Afrofuturism talk about Afrofuturism. All of them speak about humanistic approaches to developing technology. About 47 minutes in, Hendryx talks about this. At Reid projects outward to include STEM/STEAM learning (“throwing the manual away”).
Recently (on Twitter) Onyx Ashanti tweeted this:
[initialize]
metabit has evolved
here, i use 3, 8-bit metabit hieroglyphs,
all facing inward instead of out
as a representation of rgb color relationships.
this should produce
precise, spatialized representations of all 32-
bits(interavals)
per knuckle(sensor) group
[stop]
Meta means “beyond,” “after,” or “behind.” A bit is a unit of information that is expressed as 0 or 1. Artists channel technologies and platforms in which black people are writing code, mining data and coming up with solutions to problems. This is what Du Bois and Baraka were speculating and what Rammellzee was prototyping in his studio decades ago. According to Nora Rossbach, the Megascope is a very early example of “reappopriating and re-deploying Western technological knowledge against itself to unravel the complex contradictions of the capitalist and white-supremacist political imaginary.”