Painting With Code: Afrofuturism & Ambient Poetics
In Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness I describe Afrofuturism 3.0 as a utopic vision, a web of cultural art and data, or merely as a natural paradigm shift in the creative practices of the African diaspora on the Web. This is a third wave taking place over two decades after writer Mark Dery coined the term in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture to capture what was happening in a black world that was increasingly mediated by computers.
…we find ourselves in the age of acceleration, strongly influenced by the pervasive nature of social media, its ability to shrink the world as we know it, and other societal factors like the financial crisis of 2008 and the surge in visible terror against black bodies. Terror in the form of racial profiling, police brutality and systemic racism, which contributed to movements like #BlackLivesMatter. —Jehan Latief
The battlefront has moved from cyberspace (more broadly) to the very building blocks of computer networks: code. Written compilations such as Captivating Technology examine how present and emerging technologies are deployed to classify and coerce specific populations and whether these innovations can be resisted and reimagined for more liberatory ends. Rather than speculate about what is to come, artists and Afrofuturists are crafting their own methods to create things using code. They move between the speculative and the generative, making use of computation and fabrication to invent new art forms, practices and systems.
Onyx Ashanti uses the construct of Sonocybernetics to insert sonic and technological issues into a network of perpetual self-programming. Calling himself a “patternist” after the work of Afrofuturist science-fiction writer Octavia Butler, Onyx believes in the potential of granular sound to herald a new age of communication beyond the cumbersome limits of spoken language. Through the movement of his hands, feet, and head, fractal emissions of synthesized sound are generated in space.
We are entering an era where computer networks are “convoluted”, becoming extremely complex, (often) iterative and generative. In 2015, Google released the code to DeepDream, a program used to find and enhance patterns in images via algorithms. The program was invented to help scientists and engineers to see what a deep neural network is seeing when it is looking in a given image. Recently, DeepDream advanced a new form of art.
Virtual, generative (algorithmic) and gesture-based art works exemplify what Timothy Morton calls ambient poetics, which reveals the infinite connections between all things include the layering, floating, accumulation of objects that creates space that embeds (or removes) us in the confines of the real, or the tiny prisons (of reality) of our own devising. Add to this phenomenon a layer of ‘astroblackness’ to see what is developing at the intersection of culture, emerging technology and art/design or creativity.