Faces of Complexity: Afrofuturism & Latent Space
The new Women of Afrofuturism at SFO Museum celebrates women artists who “imagine inclusive, joyful, and luminous futures for Black people while simultaneously addressing present issues and past injustices.” Afrofuturism explores the intersection of science fiction or STEAM, history, personal and cultural liberation. It was coined by Mark Dery in the mid-1990s to capture the spirit of an era when Black people first engaged with the online world in unique ways, across disciplines. In “Black to the Future” Dery asked readers:
Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures?
In 1996, Edward George of the Black Audio Film Collective and John Akomfrah produced The Last Angel of History, a 45-minute documentary film that addresses Afrofuturism as a metaphor for displacement. The fictional story follows the journey of the “Data Thief” who must travel across time and space to collect fragments of history and technology in search of a code that holds the key to his future. In reality, this action is a form of data scraping, also known as ‘web scraping’, which deals with extracting data from online sites to be used for various purposes.
Note: Data scraping is a powerful tool for collecting and analyzing online data, but it’s important to be aware of the ethical and legal considerations involved.
Latent space, a concept in generative artificial intelligence or GenAI, is the new cyberspace and, in actuality, provides a way for AI’s ‘data thieves’ to scrape the Web for content. Latent space transforms more complex forms of raw data (i.e. images, video), into simpler representations which are more convenient to process and analyze. A related concept called diffusion transforms the simple representations (like random noise) into a complex data distribution (like a realistic image). Diffusion models start with random noise and sequentially remove unnecessary data to generate new content that resembles the training data.
At a time when AI is rapidly advancing and transforming different aspects of human life Afrofuturism invites us to imagine new possibilities and futures, by exploring alternative systems and technologies. Afrofuturism aligns with the potential of latent space in AI, a speculative activity that uses neural networks, training models and generators to explore alternative scenarios (ex. worldbuilding, speculative futures). While these are separate concepts, there are connections that can be explored. What is on display at the SFO Museum are several works that merge speculation with science, technology, engineering, art, and even mathematics or STEAM.
Speculative futures — design approaches that visualize new and potential worlds — move us beyond what currently exists into the realms of what could be. Long used in art, film, fiction, architecture, and industrial design, the tools employ speculation to provoke, imagine, and dream into what lies ahead. — Johanna Hoffman
Afrofuturism challenges traditional narratives and systems, largely through speculation and making, while latent space can be used to break down the limitations of how we view data. Both concepts deal with complex information. Afrofuturism explores the complexities of history, culture, and social structures. Latent space helps training models handle the complexity of large datasets. My work in the SFO Museum exhibition interrogates and experiments with these concepts and practices.
Examples in Practice
Artists can use latent space principles to create digital art that embodies Afrofuturist themes, such as exploring the intersection of technology and identity. My work has helped me to better understand AI and latent space such as how training models learn meaningful features and relationships that might not be obvious in raw data. “Afro-Surrealist Carnival” is a series of works that I’ve been creating using text-2-image and neural style transfer (different AI-based models and methods). The image below is a feature of the new “Women of Afrofuturism” exhibition at the SFO Museum (San Francisco International Airport).
I began working on “Afro-Surrealist Carnival” (see above) nearly three years ago. The works combine Afrofuturism and Afro-surrealism, which are distinct artistic and intellectual movements that share common ground in exploring the ‘Black experience’. Afro-surrealism reimagines the absurdity of the Black experience through surreal imagery. My series pulls from these ideas, as well as Italian Futurism that celebrated speed, technology, and modernity, and French-born Surrealism that focused on exploring the unconscious and the realm of dreams. The original Futurists imagined what we now call generative AI and one of the early GenAI tools is called DeepDream. Deep Dream Generator was used in combination with text-2-image (MidJourney) to create works such as “Afro-Surrealist Carnival.”
In Afrofuturism on Web 2.0, I wrote about the convergence of ‘Afrofuturism 2.0’ and the Semantic Web, as vernacular cartography that “straddles the boundaries between culture, art, information and representational space.” This term refers to mapping and mapping practices that emerge from everyday life, local knowledge, and the experiences of individuals or communities. Works by artists such as Mark Bradford and Olafur Eliasson are examples of this (above). Eliasson’s work is made up of neon tubes that represent international time zones. Bradford’s collage is simultaneously revealed and obscured by geometric strata.
Furthermore, isn’t the unreal estate of the future already owned by the technocrats, futurologists, streamliners, and set designers — white to a man — who have engineered our collective fantasies? — Mark Dery
There is a growing understanding and concern that certain technologies can be viewed as “antithetical” due to their potential to perpetuate and even amplify racial bias and systemic inequalities. This perspective is grounded in areas such as algorithmic bias that reflect and perpetuate existing biases present in society and historical data. Systemic racism can be encoded into technical systems, leading to unintentionally discriminatory outcomes. Technologies are designed by people, and those designers’ values, ideologies, and biases are often embedded in these platforms and tools. My work addresses these issues through creative uses of generative AI.
“mOTHERboard” (2024), the image that bookends the SFO show, is a play on the motherboard, a printed circuit board that contains the principal components of computers or other devices. The motherboard is often referred to as the “backbone” or “spine” of the computer, as it’s the central point where everything else plugs in and communicates. Also, I see the design of the motherboard as a technological and vernacular map.
“mOTHERboard” also follows the mother as the “backbone of the family,” which highlights the central role women often play in providing support, guidance, and stability for their families. Mothers also play a crucial role in nurturing, teaching, and caring for children and others, contributing significantly to the well-being of the entire unit.
The show also features my AI-generated portraits of sci-fi author Octavia Butler, Star Trek actress Nichelle Nichols, NASA “human computer” Katherine Johnson, NASA astronaut Mae Jemison, and musician/spiritualist Alice Coltrane.
In addition to my images the show features artwork by Oakland-based filmmaker and artist Celia C. Peters, interdisciplinary artist Alisha B. Wormsley, San Francisco native Afatasi the Artist, and artist and professor D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem. Visitors can also look at various artifacts such as Ytasha Womack’s Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture, and music by Coltrane, Grace Jones and Janelle Monáe. Overall, these works embody the spirit of Afrofuturism in 2025, when outside forces (once again) threaten the livelihoods of many Black artists, historians, and scholars/academics.
Exhibition info:
SFO Harvey Milk Terminal 1
Departures Level 2, Gallery 1D
May 17, 2025 — Sep 27, 2026