Encyclopedia of Afrofuturism

African diaspora

African digital consciousness

"Because even if there are no theories, the incredible SEEPAGE of technology and non-linear mediation into peoples' consciousness is very real. Even for the day-to-day people. For better or for worse, people are becoming more and more accustomed to thinking and interacting in asynchrous modes (like email and lists), detached modes (like chat rooms) and what I'll call digisected modes (like your pseudo-spiritual awareness of all the corporate entities that manipulate electronic representations of you). These transformations are on such a subtle level, such a HUMAN level undefinable even by the marketing engineers who would hope to harness them, that theories often distort one's perception of them. But the energy that is produced by people adapting to new ways of thinking exists nonetheless... like fucking gravity... pulling, stretching, bending light, shaping time.

What will it add up to in the end? Who knows. What does it "mean" in day-to-day life? Typical human heroics: staring @ a screen all day conjuring the future out of thin air, piling onto a bus or train to get home, having only a necktie or a hairstyle to express your individuality... From the creeping bureaucracies of the wellfare state to collapsing distances between you and your creditor. From crackheads with ATM cards to itinerant DJs aiding in the mutation of african american cultural priorites worldwide. One day it will all be terribly cross-referenced and your soup spoon will be part of a collective consciousness that includes the processors that manage your antilock braking system.

Our little list-clique seems to be struggling with what will become of african americans in this future... mainly because we've barely defined the "old" afam identity and are almost sad to see it vanish in the face of this latest middle passage. But check it, afam identity has NEVER been stable, and when it becomes stable that will be a sad sad day. Where theory comes in is by presenting a model by which this fluidity can generate stable ethics, morals, creativity and a desire to struggle. W.E.B. DuBois gave us a foundation but even that binary split has outlived its usefullness. Albert Murray gave us the heroics of the blues and this has sustained hip hop even at its most embarassing moments. I'll be utopian and say that those of us lurking and participating can cobble together the next effective model. Essentially, western culture has caught up to where we've been since arrival and will probably "crash and bleed out" in some form or another." [David Goldberg (aka Mr. Bollweevil]

afrofuturism

afronaut

afrosonic arts

analog

"Though not technically the "opposite" of digital, is EVERYTHING else: the waves, the sunlight, the earth's magnetic field, your heartbeat, your resonnant frequency, plate tectonics, your voice and -- though this is a subject of serious debate in the discourses on artificial intelligence --voyour consciousness. Though neuronal function can be reduced to on/offvdualism, the collective interaction of all of them definitely isn't... and this leads us to all the classic questions of mind, body, soul, consciousness." [David Goldberg (aka Mr. Bollweevil]

Audio Gumbo Server Protocol

http://www.sfo.com/~mhadi/gumbo/

"I've been doing realtime streaming DJ sets from http://www.betalounge.com/ for the past two years now but I must admit that the multiple-participant collaboration is still a bit of a grail. This crew called resrocket had a tool they built that allowed multiple users to "jam" across the net all at once and it was pretty successful (go to the site, hit PAST SHOWS and search for resrocket) but if there's going to be the kind of realtime interaction that Reid Harward is talking about, we need some sort of Audio Gumbo Server Protocol (TM!!!).

I know that Paul Miller has spun with an audio guy named Scanner who incorporates whatever happens to be on the airwaves into his set -- the cellular frequencies serve as his gumbo. If we can design something that lets people dip their spoons into an audio database, and become a server in and of themselves (with the ease that someone can set up a hotline server), guests could then listen in to what was cookin' and contribute if they liked. Here I would like to re-emphasize the necessity of a high quality portable device so people aren't tied to their desks.

I'm not sure if we really have the shareware for people to do the mixing/serving/streaming part, though loop production is quite feasible with the tools that Reid mentioned.

What we should do is assemble a team of hardware and software engineers to put something together. How many degrees of separation are we from J. Thompson (inventor of Lingo) and some other hip (hop) tech-heads. I could do some top-down design and interface work but I don't have the time to hack the code together... anybody wanna help prototype this system? Paul you wanna do that crossroads thing you're so good @ and manifest a crew?" [David Goldberg (aka Mr. Bollweevil]

the Black Beats

"I have long hoped that some writer of great energy and insight would do a book on the 'Black Beats," a loosely identified group of writers, musicians, and artists who certainly qualify as precursive afro-futurists. I've seen isolated essays on LeRoi Jones [Amiri Baraka] and Ted Joans, etc...but nothing really comprehesive, particularly not from the Ann Charters cabal of Beat historians. This is a good time to pitch such a thing to agents and pub houses because they are in the middle of a publishing frenzy over ideas and artifacts of the "beatnik era". I know bell hooks has already done enough research in this area to be a good candidate, and Paul it seems you have interest in this area as well. Any thoughts about doing this sort of book? " [Carol Cooper]

Bobby Digital

"I've always been fascinated by the WU and when I heard the RZA had created a character called Bobby Digital, I scoured every newstand, website and list that I could think of that might have some information about this this new character and the RZA's new CD. I anxiously awaited the release of this album; I wanted the RZA to, as Paul would say, take a future step. The RZA's using the name digital led me expect something 'new.' While I was intrigued by the interviews; I was underwhelmed by the music. I'm not a musician, but as a music fan I was disappointed with the beats and the lyrics; what I heard were familiar beats/samples/sounds and misogynistic rhymes. No future steps here, sounded old school to me.

All of this to say that, no, Bobby isn't really digital." [Alondra Nelson]

the break

capoeira

"There are African martial arts (Afro-Brazilian capoeira, for example) in which I find a lot of compelling metaphors. Took a weekend long capoeira workshop a few years ago (my shoulder is recovering just fine, thank you) in which the Brazilian instructor pointed out how some of the movements got that way because the Africans would have been fighting with the shackles on that chained their ankles together making only short steps possible. The movement references the history. This stuff is so rich, as an artist I'm compelled to search it out and incorporate it into the mix." [Nalo Hopkinson]

collage

creole

cybernetics

cyborgs

diaspora

digital

"The representation of continuous signals in the form of absolute symbols (1s & 0s, yes & no, flag up/down, dot & dash etc.) The accuracy of this representation depends on the SAMPLE RATE: how often a continuous signal is monitored (sampled) and the SAMPLE RANGE: the minimum and maximum frequencies that a digitizing process can sample. The wider the range and the higher the rate, the "better" the digitization is. In most industrial and commercial applications, "better" means that the digitized signal lends it self to error-free duplication, mutability, sorting and processing. But keep in mind that when a continuous signal is digitized, some of that signal is LEFT OUT. A good example of this process is the "flatness" of early CD audio when compared to the "warmth" of vinyl. Another is the quality of a cast shadow when compared to the graphics of an early video game. Digital information is nifty because it becomes essentially "universal" in that a set of 1s and 0s that represents an image can be interpreted as sound, or text or temperature controls or speed (whatever!) -- as long as the COMPUTER that processes these bits is told how to do so." [David Goldberg (aka Mr. Bollweevil]

"'Digital' might actually be a useful metaphor for black technological consciousness, not consciousness in the metaphysical sense, but in the sense of having a *progressive* engagement with the world, being of the moment, in a variety of ways." [Alondra Nelson]

digital double consciousness

See also double consciousness.

"Networked consciousness--a place where doubles (a la Freud's notion of the uncanny and reflection find themselves suddenly confronted with what Franz Fanon called "displacement," and where on-line psychologist Sherry Turkle, calls the "Second Self" acts as an identity workshop--the "real" reflected in the myriads possibilities generated on-line)." [Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky)]

digital freedom

double consciousness

Term originating with W.E.B. DuBois, first appearing in his colleciton of essays, The Souls of Black Folk. See also digital double consciousness.

"Double consciousness may be better phrased as multiple consciousnesses. But, since many, including myself, still find DuBois' formulation useful, what about a single subject comprised of multiple and layered double consciousnesses that reflect various aspects of identity. Double consciousness, as it has been used/understood elevates racial identity to the detriment of other segments of identity.

I think that this overemphasis on a singular and absolute racial identity has constrained our ability to represent the complexity of "blackness" in theory, art, literature.... This is way sci-fi and futurism are so interesting to me; they provide opportunities for imagining completely new representations of Afro diasporic lives." [Alondra Nelson]

" 'Double consciousness' works for me too. Doubling, re-doubling; however high an individual needs to count depends on the configuration of their particular experience of diaspora. I wanted to make the point that the experience of doubled consciousness has diverse forms." [Nalo Hopkinson]

"I read DuBoisian double consciousness as an inherent and self-evident critique of the Internet as postulated by assholes like the folks at WIRED magazine. The problem isn't necessarily the Internet, it's the irresponsible vision that's been mapped onto it. " [Art McGee]

dub

empiricism

"The experimental method requires replicable results as a truth condition. This provides data; and although data is always subject to interpretation, it grounds interpretation, or at least it should. So though science definitely has a mythos, it also has this experimental method to constantly pull it back down to earth, so to speak, when the grand visions go awry--and they go awry a whole lot more often than scientists would like to admit. But this truth condition is worth holding onto, I think, and distinguishing from myth." [Ben Williams]

gangsta

"I suppose I would say that the gangsta persona is more slippery than people often give it credit for, and (tracing it back to the Stag O'Lee/Stack O Lee character of blues legend), can sometimes contain aspects of the trickster. It's there as a historical stereotype for black artists to use (in the 70s, for instance, we're talking about records like Hustler's Convention), and yes, its also one that white people are by now pretty comfortable with black artists using, which black artists can often profit quite easily from; your archetypal double-edged sword, in other words. Some use it ironically; some play with it and end up believing it; some want to live up to it; some see it as a logical expression of their world. In other words, there's room for quite a few strategies within that persona, not all of them negative." [Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky)]

hiphop gnosticism

hybridization

Ifá

"Ifà divination is a digital system, but more specifically a digital "storage device" and interface used to index _very_ analog stories that are interpretable by the babalawo... Ifà is not a Von Neumann computer, you can't really _program_ it (that would defeat its purpose!)... Ifà, like other divination systems, uses a finite symbol/rule set to access "infinite" spaces of knowledge." [David Goldberg (aka Mr. Bollweevil)]

low-tech

mobility

"Until we can engage each other with the improvisational immediacy of the battle (hip hop, dancehall soundclash or jazz), the internet will only be about commerce and the dialog of special interest groups. Wouldn't all of you rather be having this conversation (complete with the rhythms of call and response, riff, solo and chorus) on a portable device instead of being stuck in front of a glowing screen? It's the mobility of the itinerant artist (griot, train hobo, blues person, big band, mobile sound system, flossin' lowrider, graf writer, touring rapper) that forms the unshakable foundation of black creative expression. Our successful engagement with the 21st century (as more than consumers) may depend on us being able to bring this approach to its hardware, software and media. This will mean empowering two groups: the artists and the young, with the means of developing and producing 21st century technology. I am especially interested in the latter group because they will produce the unexpected -- not the homogeneous -- for their own cultural (and economic) ends. If they are made aware of their traditions, what they come up with might not be as alienating." [David Goldberg (aka Mr. Bollweevil)]

mothership

Nation of Islam

"From an interview with Wu-Tang affiliated rapper Killah Priest in the February, 1999 issue of Harper's, excerpted from Transition, a journal published by Duke UP and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard.

KELFA SANNEH: Why do you rap so much about outer space?

KILLAH PRIEST: Because that's where we're from! Black people come from space. When you look at the sky, it's black. Without sunlight, forget it: it's black. In the beginning, there was darkness.

KS: Elijah Muhammed wrote that Earth was created when the moon was deported from this planet 66 trillion years ago. Is that "the beginning" you're talking about?

KP: I ain't talking about that. I'm talking about pure facts. In the beginning, "darkness was upon the face of the deep." Man was made on a certain day, he went and got corrupt, and he's been corrupt ever since. He's been destroying the world, he's been hiding identities, he's been lying, stealing--all of that. But space travel is real. When they speak of unidentified flying objects, a lot of people don't understand what that means. Ezekiel saw UFOs back then, only they were IFOs, because he identified them. He knew what they were. They were chariots of fire. They call them spaceships now. That's where the old Negro song comes from: "Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home."

KS: Are these spaceships different from the Mothership that the Nation of Islam preaches about--the craft that abducted Louis Farrakhan in Mexico in 1985?

KP: No, it's the same. People call it Mothership, chariot, UFO, but it's all the same thing.

KS: Fard Muhammed taught that despite the Mothership, the true home of the Original People was Earth. Do you believe that this spaceship is going to take African-American people someplace else?

KP: That's what's been predicted. Christians talk about the rapture, Christ coming back and the sky cracking up. The American government says that if anything comes out of space, we should all help fight it. The whole world has gone mad: one group of people is waiting for a spaceship, while another group is waiting to shoot it down. Isaiah 66:15: "the Lord will come with fire, and with his chariots like a whirlwind." He's going to come and wreak vengeance, because there are a lot of lies out there.

KS: Are you talking about movies like Independence Day? The Nation of Islam's newspaper The Final Call attacked that movie as a racist perversion of the Day of Judgement.

KP: Word. Like the movie Independence Day. There are people who know what's going to happen. They are part of the elite 10 percent of society, the ones that know truth and hide it. When you talk about religion, there's always a righteous 5 percent and a devious 10 percent--the other 85 percent of people are ignorant.

KS: The government--that's the 10 percent, right?

KP: Yeah. And I have to watch myself, too. When Christ spoke out like this, they came against him." [Ben Williams]

the new turntable

"I think that we live in a time where we can cobble together the New Turntable from a number of existing applications, some conceptual framing, and a bit of intention. These applications are online conferencing, and the creation of audio using composition tools such as protools and cooledit. The New Turntable is collective, web-based audio creation.

This idea is novel, revolutionary and can't wait to hear some of the audio. What's more, it follows many of the memes exhibited by the new economy

First, it's attention based, free, open source, and home grown. It's built with shareware, free conferencing systems and loops given away as gift. As an extra added bonus, it's done out of love by people who don't intend to make millions of dollars from it, for the sake of experimentation. This is unbelievably important, as it allows some time for gestation before the Industry takes notice and attempts to co-opt.

Second, it disregards geography while emphasizing connectivity -- it recognizes that the club (point) has evolved from a physical space, to a dimension of intention (net). Locality is tyranny. Webspace is kinetic. Kick it!

For a good 2 years I've contemplated the idea of a space where the collective creation of audio could take place. This would be a dub workshop, if you will.

What does it take to make this a reality. First, we need to be able to conference -- to talk to one another in a collective space. Check!. Second, we need to be able to compose audio and share it with others in the collective. We can do this with shareware. Third, we need to be able to show others what we've done. It's got to be easy to use, as visual as possible and it's got to be shareware from the ground up. It must resemble mixing and spinning as much as possible. No one has to write another single line of code to make it so.

And the tools are all here. In this age where everything is being given away, there's no reason why we can't do it with the existing technology. No one has to write another single line of code to make it so. [Reid Harward]

Petro

pop-culture

"One thing that I find fascinating is that we are probably one of the only ethnic groups on the planet to look so intensely at pop culture for our values. Of course Bobby Digital isn't going to fulfill alot of the progressive memes we'd like to map onto the resonance of what RZA is trying to do. I went over to the royalton hotel a couple of months ago when RZA finished his album (they filmed the movie version in the same building where I have my studio), and spoke to RZA about the "persona" of bobby digital. Do you think all white people look to Marilyn Manson--and yes, he sells alot of records and is in the billboard top whatever--to reflect on their identity? I don't think so. This is the same problem I encountered at the Voice and other "liberal" newspapers that forge and create identity issues in the late 20th century. And I can tell you--you will not find answers to these issues there. ... The media is so out of step with how people actually are living that this kind of stuff stifles other, new, and more dynamic critiques of what's happening. The word "persona" simply means "mask" in latin. It's original meaning is simply "that through which sound enters"--"per-sona." If you'll look at the liner notes to rza as bobby digital in stereo you'll see a caption where RZA says "I'd like to thank all the women in my life who put up with bobby digital." Even in small print, it's a strange thing to see on an album with lyrics as hardcore as are on the B to the O to the BB and Y. All I can say is that I wish the narrative focus could be on artists like Keith Piper, David Hammons, Ellen Gallagher, myself, Adrian Piper, and a host of other progressive people. But maybe we aren't trendy enough.

"Whenever we look to corporate culture - it's not just the music industry that has a, to use mr bollweevil's phrase "sharecropping" relationship--look at the basic model of the media and try walking through any office--liberal or conservative--and you will see the same model. I think that public enemy's release of its single on-line is great, but it always depresses me to see that people all of a sudden need to see everything validated by pop culture to realize--yes, people who have been doing this already, could use the same platform and create a real zone of dynamic narrative change. ... Pop culture is only the tip of the iceberg, but at the same time, as above so below. I started the discussion of double consciousness--if such a thing exists is subject to debate, it all depends on how much you give validation to any of the constructs around you--as a metaphor for how ALL people create identity on-line. The strange this is that it was street culture that created the first "generative syntax" for the modus-operandi. I don't think that people are getting that, yes we have historic angles on this--but what African Americans have given to the world, I think, is the sense of identity as abstraction with the found objects of technology. With these two variables teche and logos--you get a third vector--a place where identity becomes improvisational. No fixed points on this grid. The first people to engage turntable culture--the first thing they did was create new personas to match the sounds they were spinning. Follow the same trajectory and you'll wind up in a MUD or MOO--it's a structural relationship with technology that no one else on this planet dealt with. How do the sounds of turntables lead to multiple identities? How do the differences in generations - the perceptual relationship between self and other as mediated by technology - become points of strength when you have so many other variables trying to make it a weakness?" [Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky)]

post-Rational

"Something you can see in the strange resonances of fabric--Warhol's repetitions compared to the reconstructions of different motifs in African fabric (specifically the west coast regions), a "cybernetic" artist like Vasarely's geometric motifs find strange resonances in Arab culture's continuous referencing of the name Allah (whose image cannot be seen, only written in a calligraphic and geometric repetition on buildings), graffiti writ large? All of these are structural resonances where names and identities have been reconfigured as parts of an on-going narrative remix--old into new, new into old--these are the signs of emergent cultures within the frameworks of established ancient paradigms. Where there is a shock to the system (like christianity in roman times, Islam later, hip-hop today), you will find these fracture points in the visual culture. There's a great book by an old Italian proto anthropologist called The New Science in which he talks about science as a system of mythological signs, and in almost all of the European tradition of post renaissance "rationalism" you'll find this under-current of systems--Newton's infamous 1687 Principia: "Absolute, True, and Mathematical Time, of itself, and from its own nature flows... All motions may be be accelerated and retarded, but the True, or equable progress, of Absolute Time is liable to no change..." This is a classic sense of European descriptions of time. But at the same time another philosopher Francis Bacon wrote of a city of god in his 1627 essay "The New Atlantis" that a city held together by divine will (European monotheism) would be able to absorb individual expression and move into a place of timelessness as well, as the representative of the city tells a wayward voyager who happens upon the shores of this city "we have also sound houses, where we practice and demonstrate all sounds, and their generation...We have also means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances..." There's sense that what these people were dealing with, whether you look at contemporary science (which has thoroughly absorbed and remixed Newton, or the modern city, where almost everything that Bacon was describing is now the norm, has come to a place where the rational demarcation of time and space has moved into a place that can only be called Post-Rational (let's not forget that Rational is based on ratio--the relationship of the part to the whole). To me this is where most of the really interesting new narratives are being forged. IN the night clubs, in the fiber optic cable holding the cities together, in the abstract spaces of a culture of dematerialization. Let's not forget that the aesthetic of the 19th century inheritors of Newton and Bacon were dealing with physical objects--the internal combustion engine, cylinders, mechanical gear shifts etc etc. What holds us together today are things like electromagnetic fields, nuclear reactors, encrypted signals, etc. etc. A place that seems surprisingly correspondent with several ancient areas of African culture in general." [Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky)]

quantum consciousness

"Re: quantum theories on human consciousness

This would bring up interesting questions like 'Well if I have cells all over in every part of my body, doesn't that make my left foot every bit as smart as my pancreas, as smart as my amygdala ...' and so on.

Without really resolving this question or putting a definitive endnote, I think this is a good analogy for the body of the Internet.

Made up of individual cells that stream in data bits over networked phone wires across Americas, overseas and into space.

This would relate to the current issue of who would overrule the most profit-generating interest of the web, traditionally overseen by the govt. from back in the days of the Arpanet.

If commercialized, which seems like the direction that it's heading towards, we would have an AOL-ized web. If you think commercialism is bad now, private interests would insure that it would be even worse if control were handed to them.

Should it stay in the public US govt. reign it would bring up interesting questions as to what roles other foreign countries ( particularly emerging economies ) should play in Internet governance.

I believe ICAAN (sp?), United Nations agency that controls international telephone wires and communications, is deliberating but slowly as usual with the pace of a Siamese snail, bickering and divided amongst itself as to the pace and direction."

[Yvonne Liu]

See Paul Miller's manifesto on Quantum Consciousness.

Rada

remixing

remix mythologies

"Remix mythologies that parallel the post-structural implications of digital media can be found throughout these Americas. This isn't that new of an item--but what makes African American culture unique amongst the erasures is the continuous mirroring it has found in the culture of white Americans. Mime and pose, pose and mime. It's a phantom dance that makes people like Thomas Edison (don't forget that he thought that the phonograph could capture the voices of the dead, and had alot of other kooky ideas about mechanical devices), seem positively in tune with the fluid sense of identity that the late 20th century lives and breathes. It's not a strange world: we live it everyday. Minds within minds, voices within voicesit's a milieu in which Sherry Turkle's notion of the "Second Self" in digital culture seems to really be the NORM by which people create identity. There's an excellent book by Erik Davis entitled Techgnosis that systematically analyzes this kind of phenomenon, and Robert Pelton's The Trickster in West Africa that highlight the migration of subconscious values that the slave trade carried over the Atlantic. Examples include the "real life" of Vodoun and Candomble in the Americas that imbricated Catholic saints with the divinities of West Africa while retaining the formal representations of European imagery(as it appears in William Gibson's novels) and the truly intriguing urban reconstructions of hip-hop, jungle, and techno--the fascination with sampling has truly intriguing paralles with transubstantion. Marshall McLuhan wrote long ago that the Americas provided a unique context for new technologies to grow: the lack of ancient established social hierarchies allowed the technologies to spread through the colonies based on their use value rather than social value--this is a phenomenon that has been traced from European resistance to the telephone to new forms of mass technologies based on the collapse of distance AND social hierarchy like fabrics, wallpaper, and of course, languages. But what makes all of this relvant to the discussion is the sense of total theater that African cultures fused with European values of science and rationalism. The resolution of the conflict between these impulses, to me, dissolves W.E.B. DuBois' idea of the color line by absorbing it into the realm of vicarious experience--one of the areas digital culture has made a core element of its expansion into the realms of the everyday. Minds within minds--think of it as an archeology of the many in the one. One of my favorite composers, Iannis Xenakis has an excellent book on systems music, Arts-Sciences: Alloys, in which he wrote out algorithms measuring functional aspects of the music of most world cultures (as an appendix to his manifesto on music and architecture called Formalized Music). It's all code, and its all translatable." [Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky)]

science

science fiction

"One finds a lot of the signature tropes of sci-fi one at the turn of the century--there's the classic narratives of H.G. Wells (The Time Machine and War of the Worlds)--the theme of the Alien as either an underclass (Moorlocks) or as having access to remote areas of science but as we see in the narrator in Wells' War of the Worlds " they took the fresh living blood of other creatures, and injected it into their own veins..." The narrator of the story goes on to say "the bare idea of this is no doubt repulsive to us, but at the same time I think that we should remember how our carnivorous habits would seem to an intelligent rabbit..." Wells was intrigued by the way class and race structures were being re-inscribed onto the progressive areas of science--knowledge, as we know in our info age, holds the frame together. But there are other takes on the same trope, but from another angle. Check William Burroughs, where he described a city [Tangier, I think] as a kind of landscape at war with the way life flowed through its corridors and pathways. Encoded messages create the way we move on-line and in the city, or for that matter, anywhere there are humans involved in that consensual project we call "society." An agent who has lost the thread of control wanders lost through a city controlled by an abstract presence in Burrough's Naked Lunch "so I am a public agent and don't know who I work for, get my instructions from street signs, newspapers and pieces of conversation..." but compare these issues to what we get in both Octavia Butler and Samuel Delaney--the issue is one of central narrative versus dispersion--anomie is the name, deconstruction is the game. On this kind of level so many people project a place where the fabric of society has fallen to pieces and there really isn't much left to pick up. There's a more recent writer Kathleen Ann Goonan who writes feminist sci-fi based on nanotech in a novel called Queen City Jazz. It always seems that the more constructive messages arrive from narratives that somehow allow for permutation of the present [check Arthur C. Clark's The City and the Stars, Ursula K Leguin's The Left Hand of Darkness, William Gibson's Neuromancer, or Nalo Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring for great examples of the counter theme--i.e. somehow allowing for the co-existence of multiple narrative--thus the conclusion of the alien trope--disruption of the fabric of coherence, or as Thomas M. Disch says in his recent The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: "in the distorting mirror of fantasy, Aliens are Us [whites] by the same dark logic that equates Dr. Jekyll with Mr. Hyde. In the marketing of pop culture, there is little distinction between monsters of supernatural horror and monsters from outer space: Dracula, King Kong, the creature from the Black Lagoon, the denizens of Jurassic Park, and the Giger-inspired aliens of Alien all derive their scariness not so much from their fangs and feral natures as from their resemblance to that scariest monster of all, the Being in the Black Mirror." Disch uses the notion of this "Being" to expose the underpinnings of alot of the themes that we are dealing with in this symposium--in real life. Fear of the other, fear of different takes on contemporary reality, viral contagion of ideas and cellular information, etc etc etc all point to a plac where the imangination in the 20th century has created some of the most strange engagement with ideas we've seen for centuries." [Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky)]

street level tech

surveillance

"A system of sound sensors is planned for every street corner in Manhattan's lower east side that will send realtime information on decibel levels to a central computer at Giuliani's police headquarters. The computer will generate a shifting 3D map of sound levels across Losaida, instantly dispatching cops when decibel spikes occur. Beatbox ciphers and breakdance sessions won't be noticed over NYC's fierce roar, but community block parties and politcal rallies will...

Just like the cameras installed in New York's subway stations had their surveillance eyes spraypainted shut by graf kids, audio anarchists will build small noise generators and place them near the decibel sensors, overloading the computers with a barrage of high levels, drawing attention away from the necessary sounds of life and insurrection. Freedoms are never quietly won.

Back at police HQ: digital clipping and constant peaks, a landscape of maxed-out zones with no clue where to deploy the arms of power." [Jace Clayton (aka Jimmy Rupture)]

technology

trance

tricknology

tricksters

Vodoun

"Vodoun, and all of its Black Atlantic derivatives, are modes of getting people "on-line" that create an awareness of worlds parallel to the "real." It is not a long stretch (as demonstrated by Gibson in "Count Zero" and the marketing hype of Sun Microsystems' Jini Technology) to extend this type of complicated subject/object awareness to the electrosphere, datasphere, cyberspace or whatever you want to call it." [David Goldberg (aka Mr. Bollweevil)]