Group items tagged

Working between speculative fiction and documentary forms, duo Soda_Jerk explores Afrofuturism in a series of interrelated video installations. Excerpts from "Race for Space," "Destination Planet Rock," "Armageddon in Effect," and "We Are the Robots" are here on their site. The series seems a good supplement to the documentary by Akomfrah. Soda_Jerk digs further into histories of figures like Sun Ra and groups like Public Enemy, working as media archeologists or archivo-cyborgs, patching together new mythos using digital compositing and sound design. Soda_Jerk "Astroblack: Race for Space" 2010. Accessed February 21, 2014 http://www.sodajerk.com.au/video_work.php?v=20120921063755

This is a better article describing how she made her way into sci-fi and a great explanation of Cyborgs within Afro Futurism as metaphors for the struggle of any oppressed within a social power dynamic.

Thanks for sharing these! Now that I see the name, I think that she might have been mentioned by Soda_Jerk, guest artists in another class last semester. I'll put up link to their project, also in realm of Afrofuturism.

Here's part 1 (of 3 segments on youtube) of documentary by John Akomfrah on Afrofuturism---an African-American literary and cultural movement, associated with science-fiction writers Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler and others. This movie's protagonist the "data thief" digs through archives of past, present and future, drawing on intersections between various musical genres which share a mythos of future technology and the extra-terrestrial. The future read as history, something already happened, the Atlantic Slave trade framed as alien abduction narrative, the music producer/DJ as cyborg --- human/machine hybrid finding new connections through material memories of black culture. "The Last Angel of History (part 1)" Posted on Youtube by Desultory Heroics. November 23, 2013. Accessed February 21, 2014. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqgkXbQOi68

Janelle Monae's music is a steampunk mix of sixties jazz and pop that serves as a sort of story/soundtrack that stretches across several albums. In them she tells the story of an Android that falls in love with a human (which in the universe of the albums is forbidden) and all the conflicts/anxieties that take place as a result. The story of the android is one that Monae uses to talk about the other, the oppressed, in a sort of futuristic stranger in a strange land. I would highly encourage you to watch her short film, "Many Moons" that's imbedded into the link.