Radical Imaginaries in an Afro-Future City: Dispatch from Studio-X Johannesburg

Dispatch from Studio-X Johannesburg

Radical Imaginaries in an Afro-Future City Dispatch from Studio-X Johannesburg October 2014 If the city in the 19th and 20th centuries was a nexus of transformation, a fulcrum of modernity, within the African diaspora, what does rethinking and reimaging the city create for future urban denizens? What new kinds of urbanity and radical imaginaries become possible?

This exhibition renders an Afro-future city through a collection of places and spaces as imagined in books, articles, images and films. Curated by artists, architects, curators, and art historians in collaboration with Studio-X, the show includes works by Tanya Barson, Hansy Better Barraza, John Coney, Nolan O Denis, Mark Dery, Tanya Gershon, Paul Gilroy, Mario Gooden, Paul Goodwin, Kellie Jones, Alondra Nelson, Mpho Matsipa, Rendani Missblacdropp, Kibwe Tavares, Alexander G. Weheliye, Mabel Wilson, Peter Tolkin among others.

Entries shown in orange are featured in Avery Hall 200 from 7-12 October 2014.

Weneri Kahiu, still from the short film Pumzi, as shown in The Shadows Took Shape. [source: Studio Museum in Harlem]

BOOKS AND PUBLICATIONS The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness Paul Gilroy Harvard University Press, 1995.

Afrocentrism. Eurocentrism. Caribbean Studies.

British Studies. To the forces of cultural nationalism hunkered down in their camps, this bold hook sounds a liberating call. There is, Paul Gilroy tells us, a culture that is not specifically African, American, Caribbean, or British, but all of these at once, a black Atlantic culture whose themes and techniques transcend ethnicity and nationality to produce something new and, until now, unremarked. Challenging the practices and assumptions of cultural studies, The Black Atlantic also complicates and enriches our understanding of modernism.

warriors; new age mutant ninja hackers; technopagans for whom the computer is an occult engine; and William Gibson’s “Agrippa,” a short story on software that can only be read once because it gobbles itself up as soon as the last page is reached. [source: Duke University Press]

[source: Harvard University Press] Afrofuturism. Social Text 71 Edited by Alondro Nelson Duke University Press, 2002.

Challenging mainstream technocultural assumptions of a raceless future, Afrofuturism explores culturally distinct approaches to technology. This special issue addresses the intersection between African diasporic culture and technology through literature, poetry, science fiction and speculative fiction, music, visual art, and the Internet and maintains that racial identity fundamentally influences technocultural practices. Contributors: Ron Eglash, Anna Everett, Tana Hargest, Nalo Hopkinson, Tracie Morris, Alondra Nelson, Kalí Tal, Fatimah Tuggar, Alexander G. Weheliye. [source: Duke University Press] Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture Edited by Mark Dery Duke University Press, 1995.

“Flame Wars,” the verbal firefights that take place between disembodied combatants on electronic bulletin boards, remind us that our interaction with the world is increasingly mediated by computers.

Bit by digital bit we are being “Borged,” as devotees of Star Trek: The Next Generation would have it—transformed into cyborgian hybrids of technology and biology through our ever more frequent interaction with machines, or with one another through technological interfaces. Within these pages, readers will encounter flame

Cyrus Kabiru, Nairobian Baboob, as shown in The Shadows Took Shape. [source: Studio Museum in Harlem]

Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic AfroModernity Alexander G. Weheliye Duke University Press, 2005.

Phonographies explores the numerous links and relays between twentieth-century black cultural production and sound technologies from the phonograph to the Walkman. Highlighting how black authors, filmmakers, and musicians have actively engaged with recorded sound in their work, Alexander G. Weheliye contends that the interplay between sound technologies and black music and speech enabled the emergence of modern black culture, of what he terms “sonic Afro-modernity.” He shows that by separating music and speech from their human sources, sound-recording technologies beginning with the phonograph generated new modes of thinking, being, and becoming. Black artists used these new possibilities to revamp key notions of

modernity—among these, ideas of subjectivity, temporality, and community. Phonographies is a powerful argument that sound technologies are integral to black culture, which is, in turn, fundamental to Western modernity. [source: Duke University Press] Afro Modern. Journeys through the Black Atlantic Edited by Tanya Barson and Peter Gorschluter Tate Liverpool; London : in association with Tate Publishing; New York, 2010.

Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic explores the impact of different black cultures from around the Atlantic on art from the early twentieth-century to today. The exhibition takes its inspiration from Paul Gilroy’s influential book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). It features over 140 works by more than 60 artists. Gilroy used the term ‘The Black Atlantic’ to describe the transmission of black cultures around the Atlantic, and the instances of cultural hybridity, that occurred as a result of transatlantic slavery and its legacy. Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic reflects Gilroy’s idea of the Atlantic Ocean as a continent in negative’, offering a network connecting Africa, North and South America, the Caribbean and Europe. It traces both real and imagined routes taken across the Atlantic, and highlights artistic links and dialogues from the early twentieth-century to today. The exhibition is divided into seven chronological sections. Charting new forms of art arising from black culture and the work of black artists and intellectuals, it opens up an alternative, transatlantic reading of modernism and contemporary culture. [source: WorldCat.org] Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles 1960-1990 Kellie Jones Delmonico Books - Prestel in association with the Hammer Museum, 2011.

This comprehensive, lavishly illustrated catalogue offers the first in-depth survey of the incredibly vital but often overlooked legacy of Los Angeles’s African American artists, featuring many never-before-seen works, some of which were previously considered lost. Now Dig This! will feature artists including Melvin Edwards, Fred Eversley, David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, Senga Nengudi, John Outterbridge, Alonzo Davis,

Dale Brockman Davis, Noah Purifoy, Betye Saar, and Charles White, connecting their work to larger movements, trends, and ideas that fueled the arts during this important era of creative, cultural, and political ferment. The publication also explores the significant network of friendships and collaborations made across racial lines, while underscoring the influence that African American artists had on the era’s larger movements and trends. Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960–1980 is part of Pacific Standard Time, an initiative of the Getty. [source: Random House] Where are the Utopian Visionaries?: Architecture of Social Exchange Edited by Hansy Better Barraza Periscope Publishing, 2012.

In this radical book, architects, historians, and theorists survey the inventive, low cost work being done in obscure places to make architecture into a force for sustainable growth and social justice. The efforts are Utopian not charitable in aim. This new breed of architect-activists is endeavoring to diversity if not reinvent their profession by engaging in an “exchange” of ideas, techniques, and visions of right living with people almost always relegated to silence and invisibility.

The book opens with theoretical essays, each specially commissioned, from a stellar cast.

Michael Sorkin assesses “the site of the social” in architecture; David Gersten draws on John Hejduk’s legacy to consider architecture’s role as “a gatekeeper” between the world “out there” and everyday life; historian Jonathan Massey proposes “five ways to change the world”; with Chris Marker’s films as a springboard, Mabel O. Wilson recounts her search for traces of Valentino Deng’s ravaged village in South Sudan. [source: wherearetheutopianvisionaries.com, amazon.com] The Shadows Took Shape Naima J. Keith and Zoe Whitley Studio Museum in Harlem, 2013.

The Shadows Took Shape is a dynamic interdisciplinary exhibition exploring contemporary art through the lens of Afrofuturist aesthetics.

Coined in 1994 by writer Mark Dery in his essay “Black to the Future,” the term “Afrofuturism” refers to a creative and intellectual genre that emerged as a strategy to explore science fiction, fantasy, magical realism and pan-Africanism. With roots in the avant-garde musical stylings of sonic

innovator Sun Ra (born Herman Poole Blount, 1914–1993), Afrofuturism has been used by artists, writers and theorists as a way to prophesize the future, redefine the present and reconceptualize the past. The Shadows Took Shape will be one of the few major museum exhibitions to explore the ways in which this form of creative expression has been adopted internationally and highlight the range of work made over the past twenty-five years. [source: Studio Museum in Harlem]

FILMS AND VIDEO Space is the Place Directed by John Coney 1975, 84 minutes.

Sun Ra, space-age prophet, lands his spaceship, having been presumed lost in space for a few years. Like Ra himself, Space is the Place is one of a kind, a mythopoetic manifesto made by people who believed in Ra’s mystical message as much as they dug the raw splendor of his Afropsychedelica. [source: WorldCat.org] Jonah Directed by Kibwe Tavares 2013, 17 minutes.

Mbwana and his best friend Juma are two young men with big dreams. These dreams become reality when they photograph a gigantic fish leaping out of the sea and their small town blossoms into a tourist hot-spot as a result. But for Mbwana, the reality isn’t what he dreamed – and when he meets the fish again, both of them forgotten, ruined and old, he decides only one of them can survive. Jonah is a big fish story about the old and the new, and the links and the distances between them. [source: Factory Fifteen Film Studio]

Kibwe Tavares, Image for Jonah. [source: Factory Fifteen Film Studio]

Robots of Brixton Directed by Kibwe Tavares 2011, 6 minutes Brixton has degenerated into a disregarded area inhabited by London’s new robot workforce robots built and designed to carry out all of the tasks which humans are no longer inclined to do. The mechanical population of Brixton has rocketed, resulting in unplanned, cheap and quick additions to the skyline.

The film follows the trials and tribulations of young robots surviving at the sharp end of inner city life, living the predictable existence of a populous hemmed in by poverty, disillusionment and mass unemployment. When the police invade the one space which the robots can call their own, the fierce and strained relationship between the two sides explodes into an outbreak of violence echoing that of 1981. [source: Factory Fifteen Film Studio]

an African-American man, save his big hairy feet and psionic powers, the mute Brother struggles to adapt to his new surroundings while staying out of sight of the two white Men in Black hunting him—and getting by thanks to the sweet nature of the Harlem community that comes to his aid. Featuring a breakout performance by Joe Morton, John Sayles’ allegory about the immigrant experience and assimilation celebrates its 30th anniversary this year and has been selected as a New Black Classic by New Voices in Black Cinema. [source: The Studio Museum in Harlem/Brooklyn Academy of Music, 2014] The Changing Same Directed by Cauleen Smith 2001, 9:25 minutes.

An Alien is sent to earth to investigate the “incubators.” She discovers that she is replacing a rogue agent. She questions her mission. [source: Black Cinema House]

Cristina De Middel, image for Afronauts.

Drexciya Directed by Simon Rittmeier 2012, 27 minutes.

Kibwe Tavares, image for Robots of Brixton. [source: Factory Fifteen Film Studio]

The Brother from Another Planet Directed by John Sayles 1984, 108 minutes.

An alien and escaped slave flees Another Planet and crash-lands in Manhattan harbor. Resembling

Thomas is a smuggler, shipping European refugees who hope to find a better life in Africa.

One day his boat sinks and he is washed up on the African coast as the only survivor. He then makes his way to the nearest city – Drexciya. [source: Stwst Stadtwerkstat]

ESSAYS Black to the Future: Afro-Futurism 1.0 Mark Dery In Afro Future-Females edited by Marleen S. Barr.

(2008) The Ohio University Press [I]f all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. “Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

—George Orwell There is nothing more galvanizing than the sense of a cultural past.

—Alain Locke Yo, bust this, Black To the Future Back to the past History is a mystery ’cause it has All the info You need to know Where you’re from Why’d you come and That’ll tell you where you’re going —Def Jef Hack this: Why do so few African-Americans write science fiction, a genre whose close encounters with the Other—the stranger in a strange land— would seem uniquely suited to the concerns of African-American novel- ists? Yet, to my knowledge, only Samuel R. Delany, Octavia E. Butler, Steven Barnes, and Charles Saunders have chosen to write within the genre conventions of SF. This is especially perplexing in light of the fact that African-Americans are, in a very real sense, the descendants of alien abductees.

They inhabit a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields of intolerance frustrate their movements; official histories undo what has been done to them; and technology, be it branding, forced sterilization, the Tuskegee experiment, or tasers, is too often brought to bear upon black bodies.

Moreover, the sublegitimate status of science fiction as a pulp genre in Western literature mirrors the subaltern position to which blacks have been relegated throughout American history—in which context William Gibson’s observation that SF is widely known as “the golden ghetto,” in recognition of the negative correlation between the genre’s market share and its critical legitimation, takes on a curious significance.

So, too, does Norman Spinrad’s glib use of the phrase “token nigger” to describe “any science fiction writer of merit who is adopted . . . in the grand salons of literary power.”

Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century techno- culture—and, more generally, AfricanAmerican signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future—might, for want of a better term, be called Afro-Futurism. The notion of Afro- Futurism gives rise to a troubling antinomy: 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? Furthermore, don’t the technocrats, SF writers, futurologists, set designers, and streamliners—white to a man— who have engineered our collective fantasies already have a lock on that unreal estate? Samuel R. Delany has suggested that “the flashing lights, the dials, and the rest of the imagistic paraphernalia of science fiction” have historically functioned as “social signs—signs people learned to read very quickly. They signaled tech- nology.

And technology was like a placard on the door saying, ‘Boys’ Club! Girls, keep out. Black and Hispanics and the poor in general, go away!’”

What Gibson has termed the “semiotic ghosts” of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis; Frank R. Paul’s illustrations for Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories; the chromium-skinned, teardrop-shaped household appliances dreamed up by Raymond Loewy and Henry Dreyfuss; Norman Bel Geddes’s Futurama at the 1939 New York World’s Fair; and Disney’s Tomorrowland all still haunt the public mind, in one guise or another.

But African-American voices have other stories to tell about culture, technology, and things to come.

If there is an Afro-Futurism, it must be sought in unlikely places, constellated from far-flung points.

We catch a glimpse of it in the opening pages of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, where the protocyberpunk protagonist—a techno-bricoleur “in the great American tradition of tinkerers”—taps illegal juice from a line owned by the rapacious Monopolated Light & Power, gloating, “Oh, they suspect that their power is being drained off, but they don’t know where.” One day, perhaps, he’ll indulge his fantasy of playing five recordings of Louis Armstrong’s version of “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue” at once, in a sonic Romare Bearden collage (an unwittingly prescient vision, on Ellison’s part, of that 1981 masterpiece of

deconstructionist deejaying, “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel”). Jean-Michel Basquiat paintings such as Molasses, which features a pie-eyed, snaggletoothed robot, adequately earn the term “Afro-Futurist,” as do movies like John Sayles’s The Brother from Another Planet and Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames. Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland is Afro-Futurist; so, too, is the technotribal global village music of Miles Davis’s On the Corner and Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters, as well as the fusion-jazz cyberfunk of Hancock’s Future Shock and Bernie Worrell’s Blacktronic Science, whose liner notes herald “reports and manifestoes from the nether regions of the modern Afrikan American music/speculative fiction universe.” Afro-Futurism manifests itself, too, in early ’80s electro-boogie releases such as Planet Patrol’s “Play at Your Own Risk,” Warp 9’s “Nunk,” George Clinton’s “Computer Games,” and, of course, Afrika Bambaataa’s classic “Planet Rock,” records steeped in “imagery drawn from computer games, video, cartoons, sci-fi and hip-hop slanguage,” notes David Toop, who calls them “a soundtrack for vidkids to live out fantasies born of a science-fiction revival courtesy of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

Techno, whose name was purportedly inspired by a reference to “techno rebels” in Alvin Toffler’s Third Wave, is a quintessential l example of Afro-Futurism. The genre was jump-started in the Orwellian year of 1984 in Detroit, appropriately enough, a city equally famous for Motown and the mechanical ballets of its spot-welding robots.

The Ur-tune “Techno City” was hacked together

by Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, and Derrick May, a band of button-pushers who went by the name Cybotron. Matthew Collin notes that their worldview was “shaped by playing video games, by watching Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and by the idea of a new computer world replacing industrial society as framed in both Kraftwerk’s records and futurologist Alvin Toffler’s book The Third Wave.” According to Collin, the portentous chords and robotic clangor of their music reflected Motor City’s moribund economy, its dark passage from the birthplace of the auto industry to its burial ground. Atkins, Saunderson, and May appropriated “industrial detritus” to create sparse, kinetic funk with drums like thunderbolts, yet mournful and deeply romantic, as if the machines were whispering a lament about what it was like to be young and black in postindustrial America.

At the same time, they were young enough to be perversely fascinated by the very technologies that had downsized the American dream for

factory workers in black Detroit. “Berry Gordy built the Motown sound on the same principles as the conveyor belt system at Ford’s,” explained Atkins. “Today they use robots and computers to make the cars. I’m probably more interested in Ford’s robots than Berry Gordy’s music.” But AfroFuturism bubbles up from the deepest, darkest well- springs in the intergalactic big-band jazz churned out by Sun Ra’s Omni- verse Arkestra, in Parliament-Funkadelic’s Dr. Seuss-ian astrofunk, and in dub reggae, especially the bush doctor’s brew cooked up by Lee “Scratch” Perry, which at its eeriest sounds as if it were made out of dark matter and recorded in the crushing gravity field of a black hole (“Angel Gabriel and the Space Boots” is a typical title).

The Rastafarian cosmology, like the Nation of Islam’s, with its genetically engineered white devils and its apocalyptic vision of Elijah Muhammad returning on a celestial mothership, is a syncretic crossweave of black nationalism, African and American religious beliefs, and plot devices worthy of a late-night rocket opera. Perry— arguably the preeminent prac- titioner of the audio juju known as dub—incarnates the Afro-Futurist sen- sibility. Erik Davis asserts that “what is most important about Perry and his astounding musical legacy is how they highlight an often ignored strain of New World African culture: a technovisionary tradition that looks as much toward science-fiction futurism as toward magical African roots.” Writes Davis, “This loosely Gnostic strain of Afro-diasporic science fiction emerges from the improvised confrontation between modern technology and the prophetic imagination, a confrontation rooted in the alienated conditions of black life in the New World.” He quotes the African-Amer- ican critic Greg Tate: “Black people,” says Tate, “live the estrangement that science-fiction writers imagine.”

Which explains the seemingly counterintuitive conjunction of black dance music and SF imagery in hip-hop. Tricia Rose argues that South Bronx hip-hoppers such as Afrika Bambaataa embraced the robotic synth- pop of Kraftwerk because what they saw reflected in the German band’s android imagery was “an understanding of themselves as already having been robots.” Says Rose, “Adopting ‘the robot’ reflected a response to an existing condition: namely, that they were labor for capitalism, that they had very little value as people in this society. By taking on the robotic stance, one is ‘playing with the robot.’ It’s like wearing body armor that identifies you as an alien: if it’s always on anyway, in some symbolic sense,

perhaps you could master the wearing of this guise in order to use it against your interpolation.”

Afro-Futurism percolates, as well, through blackwritten, black-drawn comics such as Milestone Media’s Hardware (“A cog in the corporate machine is about to strip some gears. . . .”), about a black scientist who dons forearm-mounted cannons and a “smart” battle suit to wage guerrilla war on his Orwellian, multinational employer.

Milestone’s press releases for its four titles— Hardware, Blood Syndicate, Static, and Icon— make the Man- hattan-based company’s political impulses explicit: a fictional metropolis, Dakota, provides a backdrop for “authentic, multicultural” superheroes “linked in their struggle to defeat the S.Y.S.T.E.M.” The city is a battlefield in “the clash of two worlds: a low-income urban caldron and the highest level of privileged society.”

Icon, an exemplar of Afro-Futurism that sweeps antebellum memo- ries, hip-hop culture, and cyberpunk into its compass, warrants detailed exegesis. The story begins in 1839, when an escape pod jettisoned from an exploding alien starliner lands, fortuitously, in the middle of a cotton field on Earth. A slave woman named Miriam stumbles on “a perfect little black baby”— in fact, an extraterrestrial whose morphogenetic tech- nology has altered it to resemble the first lifeform it encounters—in the smoldering wreckage of the pod and raises it as her own.

The orphan, christened Augustus, is male, and echoes of the Old Testament account of Moses in the bullrushes, the fay changelings of European folklore, and the infant Superman’s fiery fall from the heavens reverberate in the narrative’s opening passages.

Like his Roman namesake, Augustus is a “man of the future”; the man who fell to Earth is seemingly deathless, outliving several generations of his adopted family and eventually posing as his own great-grandson— Augustus Freeman IV—in present-day Dakota. A rock-ribbed conservative who preaches the gospel of Horatio Alger and inveighs against the welfare state, Freeman is a highly successful attorney, the only AfricanAmerican living in the city’s exclusive Prospect Hills neighborhood. His unshakable belief in bootstrapping is challenged, however, when he takes a homegirl from the projects, Rachel “Rocket” Ervin, under his wing. A juvenile delinquent and Toni Morrison (!) fan, the streetwise teenager opens Augustus’s eyes to “a world of misery and failed expectations that he didn’t believe still existed in this country.” She calls on him to use his otherworldly powers to help the

downtrodden. When he does, in the guise of a mountain of bulging abs and pecs called Icon, she joins him as his sidekick. “As the series progresses,” we are told, “Rocket will become the world’s first super- heroine who is also a teenage, unwed mother.”

The New York graffiti artist and B-boy theoretician Rammellzee consti- tutes yet another incarnation of Afro-Futurism. Greg Tate holds that Rammellzee’s “formulations on the juncture between black and Western sign systems make the extrapolations of [Houston] Baker and [Henry Louis] Gates seem elementary by comparison.”

As evidence, he submits the artist’s “Ikonoklast Panzerism,” a heavily armored descendant of late ’70s “wild style” graffiti (those bulbous letters that look as if they were twisted out of balloons).

A 1979 drawing depicts a Panzerized letter “S”: it is a jumble of sharp angles that suggests the Nude Descending a Staircase bestriding a jet ski.

“The Romans stole the alphabet system from the Greeks through war,” explains Rammellzee. “Then, in medieval times, monks ornamented letters to hide their meaning from the people. Now, the letter is armored against further manipulation.”

In like fashion, the artist encases himself during gallery performances in Gasholeer, a 148-pound, gadgetry-encrusted exoskeleton inspired by an android he painted on a subway train in 1981. Four years in the making, Rammellzee’s exuberantly low-tech costume bristles with rocket launchers, nozzles that gush gouts of flame, and an all-important sound system.

From both wrists, I can shoot seven flames, nine flames from each sneaker’s heel, and colored flames from the throat. Two girl doll heads hanging from my waist and in front of my balls spit fire and vomit smoke. . . . The sound system consists of a Computator, which is a system of screws with wires. These screws can be depressed when the keyboard gun is locked into it. The sound travels through the keyboard and screws, then through the Computator, then the belt, and on up to the four mid-range speakers (with tweeters). This is all balanced by a forward wheel from a jet fighter plane. I also use an echo chamber, Vocoder, and system of strobe lights. A coolant device keeps my head and chest at normal temperature. A 100The B-boy bricolage bodied forth in Rammellzee’s “bulletproof arsenal,” with its dangling, fetishlike doll heads and its Computator cobbled together from screws and wires, speaks to dreams of coherence in a fractured world, and to the

alchemy of poverty that transmutes sneakers into high style, turntables into musical instruments, and spray-painted tableaux on subway cars into hit-and-run art.

Rammellzee’s Afro-Futurist appropriation of the castoff oddments of technoculture is semiotic guerrilla warfare, just as his “slanguage”—a heavily encrypted hip-hop argot—is the linguistic equivalent of graffiti “tags” all over the mother tongue. In an essay on English as the imperial language of the Internet, the cultural critic McKenzie Wark argues for the willful, viral corruption of the lingua franca of global corporate monoculture as a political act. “I’m reminded of Caliban and Prospero,” he writes. “Prospero, the Western man of the book, teaches Caliban, the colonial other, how to speak his language. And Caliban says, ‘You give me words, that I might curse you with them.’ Which is what happens to imperial languages. The imperial others learn it all too well. Make it something else. Make it proliferate, differentiate. Like Rammellzee, and his project for a Black English that nobody else could understand. Hiding in the master tongue.

Waiting. Biting the master tongue.” Wark’s analysis resonates with Tricia Rose’s notion of hip-hop countersignage as “master[ing] the wearing of this guise in order to use it against your interpolation.”

African-American culture is Afro-Futurist at its heart, literalizing Gibson’s cyberpunk axiom, “The street finds its own uses for things.” With trickster élan, it retrofits, refunctions, and willfully misuses the techno- commodities and science fictions generated by a dominant culture that has always been not only white but a wielder, as well, of instrumental technologies. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. reminds us: Black people have always been masters of the figurative: saying one thing to mean something quite other has been basic to black survival in oppres- sive Western cultures. . . . “Reading,” in this sense, was not play; it was an essential aspect of the “literacy” training of a child. This sort of metaphorical literacy, the learning to decipher complex codes, is just about the blackest aspect of the black tradition.

Here at the end of the twentieth century, there’s another name for the survival skill Gates argues is quintessentially black. What he describes as a deconstructionist ability to crack complex cultural codes goes by a better- known name, these days. They call it hacking.

-------Mark Dery is a cultural critic. He edited Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Duke University Press, 1995) and wrote Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (Grove Press, 1996). His collection of essays, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink was published by Grove Press in February, 1999. He is an occasional writer for The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice Literary Supplement, Suck, and Feed, and a frequent lecturer in the U.S. and Europe on new media, fringe thought, and unpopular culture.

Copyright (c) Mark Dery. All Rights Reserved.

[Source: Afro Future-Females edited by Marleen S. Barr.(2008) The Ohio University Press]

Points for Future Reference Mabel Wilson In Elastic - New Currents in Visual Inquiry, 2 September 2011 First a caveat, if “the past is a foreign country” as the title of historian’s David Lowenthal’s remarkable study of the modern cult of nostalgia suggests, then I would argue that the future might as well be another galaxy. Outside of the invention of the elusive time machine—perhaps Hollywood wunderkind David Cameron’s multimedia conglomerate is busily developing one for the eventual Avatar 9—turning our cultural gaze toward the future will always be directed through a prismatic lens that starts at the fleeting present moment, then refracts through our hazy recollections of the past. Thus, any effort to cast a forward glance into the future will resonate with the ethos of our current post-postmodern condition. One has only to revisit the photographs of designer Norma Bel Geddes’ epic vision for GM’s “Futurama” at the Century of Progress 1939 worlds fair, for example, a brilliantly crafted propaganda that planted in the popular imagination the financially lucrative scheme for the U.S.’s eventual suburbanization facilitated by auto-mobility, to comprehend the futility of “futurecasting.” Or one has simply to tune into a cable rerun of the 70s sci-fi flick Soylent Green, with its dystopic message cautioning the consequences of unchecked population explosion and resource exhaustion, to confirm that the sightlines that triangulate futurity are always taken from the position of where we are now. With this sound observation in mind, at this particular moment, I want to consider five contemporary points of reference that might forecast future visual studies methods and practices.

Point 1 – 1021 Akin to Ed Ruscha’s sinister suburban landscapes or Dan Graham’s banal New Jersey tract houses, the tan colored villas dominating the background of photograph “1021” align in a tight phalanx as far as the eye can see. The muddy ground and construction detritus in the foreground tell us that this place is currently under construction and that the houses, large one and two family domiciles, await occupation. Dominating the center of the frame, appears a middle-aged man, stance wide, hand firmly on his hip, talking authoritatively on his cell phone. He looks directly into the camera. His sartorial inclinations exemplify the field uniform of the transnational corporate elite: a black polo,

grey cargo shorts (harkening back to colonialist attire,) work boots to navigate the muck, a cap to keep the sun from occluding his vision, and lastly, the pouch on his belt cradling the standard issue apparatus for global capitalists, his cell phone—a device that connects him at anytime-to any market-anywhere in the world. So far this has proven to be a rather unremarkable image; indeed it seems to be a photograph that could have been taken in Sacramento or Sao Paolo or Shanghai.

Almost anywhere, save for clues offered by the other man who also inhabits the right side of the portrait, a uniformed guard—either police, military or private security. Charged with protecting the businessman from inclement weather or the blistering rays of the sun, the guard holds in his right hand a jumbo yellow and green umbrella.

Charged with protecting the businessman from threat, his other hand grasps an intimidating semi automatic rifle. Harkening back to the relationship of Manet’s black servant Laura to her white mistress the reclining nude Olympia, the guard’s pose, sideways in profile and glancing away from the camera attentive to his “master,” fortifies his rank of servitude. But there is clearly more to discern from this image. And therefore to fully analyze this image it might prove useful to inquire as to who took the photograph, where was it taken, who and what does it show, and lastly, where I first encountered it.

Point 2 – Media-scapes Photograph 1021 forms part of the Chinafrica series by photojournalist Paolo Woods. Woods’ biography charts his multi-national pedigree: born to Dutch and Canadian parents, he grew up in Italy and now finds his home base in Paris. His work has appeared in galleries and museums, as well as in print—books, newspapers, and magazines like Newsweek, Time, and Aperture, Paris’ Le Monde, and Holland’s M magazine, to name a few. As a result of this exposure, Woods’ fascinating work reaches a worldwide audience.

In the spirit of photojournalists of previous eras – Matthew Brady, Dorothea Lange, Frank Capa, Bernice Abbot, Walker Evans and Ernest Withers, his subject matter captures the fates of everyday lives caught in the turbulent currents of world events. Woods’ compelling portfolio narrates life in a globalized age. His primary genre is portraiture.

Recent topics of exploration were the so-called “new tribes,” the emerging social and class spheres wrought by the urbanization Senegal’s capital Dakar and life in the ghettoized Parisian suburb of Bondy following the recent bloody uprisings protesting economic and racist

oppression. He has documented the nouveau riche “post Soviet jet set,” “crude world” of oil production, the American chaos of Iraq, and Chinafrica – a two-year project that examines China’s growing presence and impact on the African continent. Digital camera in hand, Woods tracks the paths of transnational migrant workers, urban denizens, and refugees fleeing war; he follows the vapor trails of globe trotting capitalists and studies the insatiable appetite of global consumer culture. As visual cultural artifacts, his photographs travel along those same spatial and temporal trajectories. Woods, as well as his subjects and his portraits, circulates through what cultural theorist Arjun Appardurai has dubbed “media-scapes.” These are “image centered, narrative based accounts of strips of reality,” that make up our “landscapes of images.”

(Appadurai 35) As we view Wood’s photographs in their multiple incarnations as virtual/print/artistic images, what makes them particularly compelling is their status as portraits. Our gaze alights upon these artfully rendered snapshots of the impact of transnational migrations, capitalism and culture, and the brute force of 21st century conflict upon fragile, but none the less resilient, human relations. We are transfixed, I think, by what they tell us about global mash-ups, cultural clashes, and our shared fears and desires.

Point 3 – Chinafrica In a remarkable project that lasted over two years, Woods, in collaboration with writers Serge Michel and Michel Beuret, travelled through out the African continent studying “Chinafrica” the uneven alliance between China and 53 African countries. Woods’ caption of photograph 1021 hints at these complex historical and current web of transnational connections: Nigeria, Lagos, 2007 – Mr. Wood [no relation to the photographer] was born in Shanghai in 1948 and arrived in Nigeria at the end of the 70’s where he started an industrial empire that includes today about 15 factories with more than 1600 workers, construction companies, hotels and restaurants.

He is an official adviser to the president and has obtained the title of African chief and the authorization to use police cars as his own which helps in the monstrous Lagos traffic jams. He uses as well the police as private bodyguards, like here on the construction site of 544 villas built at record speed on the Lekki peninsula near the headquarters of the Chevron oil company.

As the Chinafrica series narrates, Chinese

representatives have negotiated new trade pacts, laid new rail and road ways, and erected new buildings, towns, and dams in exchange for for access to oil, minerals, land and burgeoning consumer markets. Cities like Lagos, which emerged from the violent colonial partitioning of the continent set in to motion by the Berlin conference of 1884, are experiencing unbridled growth due to monies generated by its prominence as an oil producers (the U.S. for example is Nigeria’s largest importer.) We must keep in mind, however, that for over five hundred years, Africa’s vast resources attracted waves of Western colonialists, foreign governments, and private companies eager to extract its resources and harness its labor to fuel Europe and the New World’s engines of industrialization.

Once arrived European powers built efficiently planned colonial towns to govern the region and facilitate the extraction and distribution of their spoils. This network of ports, castles, waterways, trade routes, railroads, highways, and pipelines transferred raw materials, peoples, and finished goods from various regions of Africa to the rest of the world and eventually back. The ongoing importance of these hubs for channeling the flows of minerals, commodities and capital fuels the rapid expansion and social transformations documented in Woods’ photos.

Foreign investment in the African continent, which according to recent UN estimates outpaces aid, is nearing $110 billion dollars. Finland’s Nokia, South Africa’s MTN, and of course, the ubiquitous Google are busily planning the next generation of new media devices and services for the vast untapped continental market. Access to the internet, will amend already existing satellite services, inundating residents with even more images of events, trends, culture and products from around the world. While the U.S. gazes west toward China, the Chinese and others look south towards Africa. And as Wood’s Chinafrica series documents, so continues the quest to extract the continent’s valuable resources.

Point 4 – bagnewsnotes.com I first encountered Woods’ photograph on the website: Bag News Notes, whose banner describes its mission as one “dedicated to visual politics, the analysis of news images, and the support of unfiltered photojournalism.” Woods’ photos featured commentary by Steve Banos, a regular blogger on photography at Reciprocity Fail.

“Below the fold,” so to speak, Banos perceptively characterizes the pose of the unidentified guard in photograph 1021 as embodying “the look of

subservience.” Recognizing the history of race and racism as they are rendered visible, he proceeds to make the case that “mistrust and isolation is blatantly apparent in so many of the indigenous faces, just as they were a hundred years ago. The body language, posture and physical proximity are also eerily resonant of the classic photos of Segregationist South or Apartheid South Africa. And although native and foreigner often work side by side, rarely do they do so together-and certainly not as equals.” He juxtaposes the contemporary photo with an older one from the Age of Empire to emphasize the replication of older tropes of master-servant power relations. In the sepia photograph, perhaps a souvenir of a journey through the Dark Continent, the black bodies (unidentified) are at the beck and call of their masters. This colonial choreography of rank illustrates what scholar Donna Haraway astutely observes as how “Euro-Americans in the field depended upon the knowledge, good sense, and hard work, and enforced subordination of a people the white folk insisted on seeing as perpetual children or even as wildlife.” (Haraway 49) While I agree with Bana that there is a duplication of such postures of subservience in Woods’ telling image, the ambitions of the Chinese government, however, are not those of a conquering colonial power arrived to subdue the “natives” with Judeo-Christian platitudes, backed up by the brut force guns to steal their land. Instead they are embarking upon a different tact, a modus operandi one that must be studied through images such as these. The Chinese government and its companies preach the virtues of the neoliberal gospels – the privatization of public resources, the importation consumer products for one and all, and establishment of minimal trade barriers to maximize corporate profit (or in the curious case of Chinese economic policy – State profit.) Overall, as the Chinafrica series show us, their transaction, along with those of other countries and transnational corporations like Chevron, are raising new concerns about environmental degradation, exploitation of workers rights, and the exacerbation of longstanding regional conflicts.

Point 5 – Visual Literacy As my concluding point, I want to suggest that even though Bag News Notes makes a valiant effort to analyze these and other images circulating in the digital ether, as do other websites like the academic journal Vectors, and old media forums such as books, magazines, and journals, more critical visual analysis needs to be

undertaken. As the editors of Bag News Notes observed in a November 2009 post: “with the staggering investment that goes into advertising and advocacy images in this country, it is any wonder nobody’s teaching, let alone preaching visual literacy.” Fundamentally we need to teach, especially to youth, critical visual literacy – teach them how to unpack, critique, and question the vast amounts of stuff that infiltrate our collective cones of vision on a daily basis. As many of us recall ten years ago CCA’s Visual and Critical Studies began as “Visual Criticism.” And I still think that critical turn is still imperative, if not more so in the era of social network feeds. Back in the 1980s philosopher Gilles Deleuze embarked on a curious project to craft a philosophy of images, demonstrated in his two volumes Cinema studies. He shows us that the “image” is neither a representation in the ideal or the thing in the real, but rather it is situated somewhere between the two, involving things and the mind in a dance of perception/recognition/attention/thought. Western philosophy after all “thinks” through language, but perhaps it is even more crucial at this moment to understand how we think through images, through of our sensory perception/conception of color, texture, movement and duration; we need to form a new global philosophy of the image. In response visual studies must take on the complex ways that visual culture is produced, circulated, and seen. And what better context in which develop new modes and methods of critical visual analysis, than amongst the active creation of visual material – video, films, illustrations, drawings, paintings, constructions and so forth, that sprout within this educational creative hot house. So here’s to ten more fruitful years of Visual and Critical Studies at CCA(C.) -------For Paolo Woods’ photographs see: http://www.paolowoods.net/ References: Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.

Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. New York: Zone Books, 1988.

Haraway, Donna. “Teddy Bear Patriarchy.” In Primate Visions – Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge, 1989.

[Source: http://elasticjournal.wordpress. com/2011/09/02/points-for-future-reference-bymabel-wilson/]

Urban Futures / Mutable Topologies Mario Gooden and Mabel O. Wilson Global Africa Lab At Mediacities, International Conference, Workshop, and Exhibition. 3-5 May 2013 at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York.

Abstract: Contemplating the status of African cities, curator Okwui Enwezor writes that “cities in their present context are modern inventions, and as the new electronic pathways that crisscross the globe circulate and readapt images of the modern city, they also produce desire for tourism that fuels new contacts and movements within already clogged global travel circuits, unraveling the strict hegemonic tendencies that have always made it difficult to read the map of spatial difference.” (Enwezor 2002) These sprawling conurbations in all corners of the African continent, like their sister cities in Asia and Latin America, challenge long held dictums about urban processes, infrastructures, and the buildings that define European and American canons on modern urbanism—“unraveling,” as Enwezor astutely observes, “strict hegemonic tendencies.” (Enwezor 2002) The urbanization of the African continent will soon create the largest megacities in world— Cairo in the North, Lagos in the West, Nairobi in the East, and Johannesburg in the South. In our research, the term “city” brackets the spatial boundaries of these urban agglomerations that exceed local, regional and through their diasporas—national boundaries.

Official reports and popular media represent African cities “as chaotic and disorderly, and,” according to Enwezor, are “therefore always outside the category of order and modern urban planning and procedures of rational spatial organization.” (Enwezor 2002; Ferguson 2006; Murray 2006; Scott 1999) Social scientists, planners, architects and policy makers impose the binaries—order/disorderly and formal/ informal— onto the spatial dynamics of African cities to make sense of their urbanism. However does the binary “first world/third world” make sense when some of the fastest growing markets in mobile and cloud computing are emerging in cities around the African continent; cities for whom technology companies are developing new products—ones subsequently marketed elsewhere in the world?

(Andjelkovic 2010; Archambault 2012; Larkin 2008) Global Africa Lab’s research outlined in this paper asks what new methods, such as

parametric modeling and data visualization, are necessary to understand the dynamic urbanism these cities present and to “read the map of spatial difference?” What conceptual frameworks of architecture and urbanism do we need in order to study how data, images, people and products circulate via their virtual and physical networks?

What can we learn from how these vectors of communication and social media cut through urban boundaries and spatio-temporal discontinuities to conjure a “space of flows?” At the global scale, this space of flows beginning in the early 1990’s gave rise to expansive networks that linked cities and crowned global capitals.

One outcome of globalization is that cities around the world became organized hierarchically according to their dominance in advanced services, producer centers and markets. Under these conditions, architecture developed an infrastructural relationship to the making of cities and urbanism became not limited to urban infrastructure but inclusive of spatial and social relationships. From our various studies, we argue that the topology of this new model of urbanism, which is an outcome of a variety of spatial processes in flux, does not upend the African city but rather it provides a reflexive lens through which to critique such flows along with the power structures, political systems, heterogeneities, and social inequalities embedded in these urban morphologies. It offers a prospect from where architects can speculate on the future of African cities.

Johannesburg, South Africa occupies a geolocation in the space of flows that until near the end of the twentieth century was a place social disjunction, political denial, cultural suppression and global boycott. Modern Johannesburg began as a colonial hub that Dutch colonists built upon the Highveld’s frozen rivers of gold, platinum and diamonds, out whose extraction flowed a river of blood and anguish. The formation of the colony, which eventually became a commonwealth and eventually a nation-state, was predicated on the racial segregation and oppression of the majority black and “colored” populations. Architect and theorist Lindsay Bremner cogently argues that the state sanctioned and violently enforced system of racial Apartheid “brought together the discursive networks of government, urban planning, public health and urban administration.... Modern town planning principles meant to maintain racial separation were overlaid on the geography and natural features of Gauteng together with the location of industrial zones and vacant lands

used to create a spatially discontinuous city and to Modern town planning principles meant to maintain racial separation were overlaid on the geography and natural features of Gauteng together with the location of industrial zones and vacant lands used to create a spatially discontinuous city and to buffer black from white, rich from poor, urban from suburban and urban from township settlements.” (Bremner 1998) Under government direction that employed the knowledge of well-trained experts, Apartheid was planned and executed to shape the nation’s landscapes and cities. The fortressed modernist commercial and residential towers of the Central Business District, like Skidmore, Owings and Merrill’s Carlton Center (1967-74), attest to the wealth generated under such harsh geo-spatial policies of racial oppression and social control.

Apartheid’s planned racial segregation that deliberately separated the “white city” from the rural “black townships” has become the substrate for today’s Post-Apartheid Johannesburg to emerge as a neoliberal hub of global capital and culture. (Mbembe 2002; Murray 2011).

Post-Apartheid Johannesburg’s current urban and architectural organization, typical of the disjunctive spaces of many global cities, produces pockets of wealth, so-called formal sectors, that are surrounded by wide swathes of informal dwelling and commerce, with much of the historic racial and economic segregation still intact.

In Johannesburg, liberated human ecologies informed by technology, information, globalization and new kinds of flows confront this landscape of gated suburban enclaves, office compounds, fenced in malls, sprawling slums, mine dumps, and abandoned high-rises to create chimera-like topologies. This new topology is punctuated by what we label as “synapses” that shear time from space and shear acceleration from evolution.

(Sola-Morales Rubio 1995) These synapses exhibit the capacity of rapid adaptation—across the ground and by way of vertical, and horizontal thresholds of urbanization. Evidence of these synaptic clefts is demonstrated by South Africa’s high mobile phone penetration rate—one of the highest in the world at 105% with 51.6 million subscribers. (Africa 2011) Furthermore, 60% of cell phones are WAP (wireless application protocol) enabled that allows 27% of rural users access to the internet through their mobile phones. Eighteen percent of South Africa’s nearly 52 million cell phones are smart phone users; overall that equates to a market of 9.5-million consumers. (The Media 2012) Taking advantage of this access, new services such as WIZZIT

have been established that utilize the internet and cellphones for banking that taps unbanked and underbanked markets. (Andjelkovic 2010) This statistic of mobile phone penetration proves staggering given that areas of many slum settlements lack landlines and adequate electric power service. While Johannesburg’s residents may be connecting in new ways across the city, from Soweto to Sandton, via these new mobile technologies, their connectivity may be interrupted at any moment by intermittent electrical blackouts due to requisite load shedding of an overwhelmed electrical grid.

Left in the wake of Apartheid’s decades long turbulent vortex, Johannesburg’s urban topology reveals a place of extreme disparities, contradictions, and contested terrains that formulate these synaptic clefts within the city’s rapid adaptation to globalization and a networked society. Further evidence of these synaptic clefts in the physical networks of the city can be found walking the sidewalks of downtown Johannesburg—the Central Business District— whose byways are cluttered with all manner of exchanges and people making their own way in the economy of mobile phone repair and as phone card and SIM card vendors. Nearby in the heavily trafficked vertical malls, locals and immigrants patronize the shops of Zimbabwean hairdressers and Angolan tailors that are wedged between internet cafes and Ethiopian coffee shops. On the busy streets of Bree and Jeppe, vendors hawk everything imaginable manufactured in China, India, and the Middle East. Hence, this synaptic topography is defined by a paradox of spatio-socio-temporal sites ruled simultaneously by exuberance, dynamism and improvisation on the one hand, and baseness and obsolescence on the other (the legacies of colonialism, post-colonization, crisis, Apartheid— and now globalization.) (Bremner 2012; Matsipa 2011; Nutall 2008) Examining this emergent urbanism, our research asks how do mobile technologies—by tethering formerly separated locales—allow the multitude (citizens, immigrants, tourists) to craft new spatial and temporal landscapes, spaces latent with agency? Aided by mobile technologies forging new linkages and networks, how might a re-territorialization of Johannesburg’s divided urban expanse be occurring?

To examine this context, we organized graduate architectural design studios that used advanced computational methods and parametric modeling to research, analy`ze, and translate

the space of flows and topological conditions of Johannesburg’s emergent urbanism. (Meredith 2008) The studios asked if architecture is a form of knowledge, the materialization of concepts, then how can we conceive architecture in Johannesburg’s spaces of disjunction? Can computational methods and advanced digital modeling enable us to decipher the complexities, transformations, and new types of relations and exchanges, development and subsistence, forms of solidarity and resistance being produced as the South African city adapts to the global restructuring of urban life?

In Global Africa Lab’s studio for Spring 2012, titled Parametri-Cities: Synapse(i)s, students mined data by using the software Rhino, in conjunction with the parametric modeling plug-in Grasshopper. They learned these techniques in workshops taught by our GAL researcher Carson Smuts. This offered students the possibility to explore parametric and computational design with unprecedented fluidity. Leveraging this capacity, the studio uncovered new strategies for design from the adaptive responses of human ecologies (informed by natural and environmental systems). By using parametric modeling students researched and mapped the visible and invisible pre-liberation and Post-Apartheid networks and flows of this cultural landscape. The preliminary research mapped the networks of capital, labor, information, raw materials, technology, knowledge, human infrastructure, transportation, and trade. The research also engaged the new types of relations and exchanges via mobile phone usage (SMS, transactions, exchanges, etc.) and time-sharing social practices, social media, and social networks (SMS, BBM, Twitter®, MXit, etc.) These new networks collapse virtual topology upon urban topography in order to allow for improvisation, adaptive responses, and the bridging of synaptic clefts to create an increasingly complex heterogeneous and mutable landscape.

The analysis by students of a particular flow (sub-sites) within this context entailed not only specifying the numerical values and mathematical relationships, but also uncovering the embedded cultural and social values of the human ecologies of Johannesburg. Research, for example, revealed that while electrical utility customers in impoverished and underserved electrical service areas such as Kliptown or Diepsloot (both in Soweto) can purchase prepaid electricity using a payment app called “Swap Wallet” on their mobile phones, these residents, whose per capita income is only one-third the income of rich white residents in the northern suburb of Sandton, pay

nearly double per kilo-watt hour for electricity than their neighbors in the north. Moreover, in 2008 the South African electrical utility company (Eskom) introduced “load-shedding”—periods of planned rolling blackouts on a rotating schedule. A geospatial analysis of the load-shedding schedule for 2011 revealed in one student’s research that black, impoverished settlements were the most adversely affected the areas of Johannesburg.

Based upon the topological conditions of these temporal and spatial disparities and disjunctions, the student investigated the ways in which new programs for collective events and even domestic rituals could be reconceptualized. The student’s proposal for an energy harvesting and distribution facility at Walter Sisulu Square in Kliptown is cross-programmed as a public “living room” that proposed collective food preparation, dining, and public health services.

Using live traffic data provided by the City of Johannesburg as well as real-time data Google Maps® traffic and Twitter® another student in the Parametri-Cities: Synapse(i)s studio, set out to test the durability of Johannesburg’s sprawling Apartheid era transportation network upon the commuting time of residents. While Johannesburg’s Metrorail system was developed primarily to transport black workers to the gold mines, planners intentionally did not to provide access to wealthy white areas in the north.

The geo-politics of the informal taxi system is problematized not only by limited access points and routes, but also by crime and mobster-like territoriality. Amid this uneven transportation system, the student’s experiment posed the following mathematical question: 6.30 am: Two people travel from their home in Soweto to Sandton. One commuter uses the C1 Rea Vaya route until Park Station and then transfers to a metered taxi. The other takes the train from the closest Metrorail stop to Park Station and then he transfers to a metered taxi as well.

How long does it take each commuter to reach his or her destination and what is the perception of space in each case?

The student developed a script to translate the live data into a time-based map along the travel routes that was then mapped onto the topography of Johannesburg. The resulting model demonstrated the disparities, traffic delays, and loss of valuable time of each commuter. It also documented spatial perceptions yielding a topology of folded, warped, bent, blended, stretched, creamed, and re-folded space-time.

The student’s proposal for a chapel in downtown Johannesburg was a critique of movement, mobility, and a transportation network that had been designed to control labor and segregate residents according to race. The new chapel would vertically and visually reconnect the disconnected places of the horizontal transportation network. Inside, visitors would encounter a container of urban sounds, hear voices against the political situation and convert events into moments of protest.

For our GAL studio in Fall 2012, titled Media/ Memory/Multitude, students researched and topologically mapped the physical, virtual and social networks of Johannesburg’s various neighborhoods including the ubiquitous mine dumps that define the city’s terrain. Paired in teams, they analyzed Johannesburg’s “media-scape”—the city’s networks of mobile telecommunications, social media, telecommunications, and surveillance. They also studied the urban “landscape”—the city’s infrastructural networks of transportation, utilities, migration, finance, mining and tourism. Using the same techniques of data mining and parametric modeling deployed in the previous spring studio, students probed the public database of official statistics—StatsOnline—maintained by the South African government. And like the previous semester, they accessed open-source real time data feeds from Twitter, Facebook, MixIT, Flickr, Four Square, or other reliable sources. Using Rhino, Grasshopper, and custom scripts to parse given and gathered data sets, students topologically mapped the transformation of these networks over time to show appearances, disappearances, shifts, drifts, and mutations in the urban topology. Students constructed a model that combined data visualized in their “mediascape” and “landscape” studies to delineate a “chronoscape”—a new space-time model of Johannesburg.

In the Media/Memory/Multitude studio, one team’s space-time analysis of tweets about the recent Marikana mine massacre, for example, demonstrated how quickly social media compresses to mere seconds the movement of information across a vast landscape that separates a remote platinum mine from a global hub like New York City. By overlaying census data indicating levels of education and literacy onto geo-tags of tweets, they also discovered in their topological “chronoscape” how virtual connectivity is still nonetheless limited in part by systemic social and economic inequalities. Another team

studied how the pre-liberation government’s stringent censorship and control of television and radio—SABC—had stymied growth in the broadcast industry that still impacts access to media in today’s South Africa. By analyzing data on the type of programming that the main television network SABC presented in English (75%), Afrikaans (9%), Zulu (7%) and other languages, they developed a chronoscape model that demonstrated how SABC fails to address the viewing needs of a diverse audience that speaks over 20 languages. For their project site, this team studied the spatial range of a densely papered message wall that hosts postings written in the many languages of the immigrants who dwell in Yeoville. As an example of a synaptic cleft in the urban flows of information, this block long message wall has resisted being digitized precisely because it operates as multilingual and multi-use public space of exchange—the wall has spawned, for example, related businesses including movers who park their pickup trucks nearby. Learning from this analogue example of “local-casting,” students conceived of a mobile broadcast unit—BYOB: Bring Your Own Broadcast—that would be locally controlled and whose content could be broadcast throughout the new network. As a virtual and urban node of connectivity, when parked on the street or in a park, BYOB’s solar panels would also provide electricity for patrons and nearby street vendors.

To conclude, we consider Johannesburg’s patchwork of emergent systems as “new collective networks of expression” (to borrow Antonio Negro and Michael Hardt’s phrase) that challenge the spatial difference wrought by decades of oppression. (Hardt 2004) “New collective networks of expression,” for example, formed the social media networks that proved fundamental to knitting together the local coalitions and global supporters of the Arab Spring (or as some have astutely pointed out that because it started in northern part of the continent—in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt— the most powerful and poignant revolution of the twenty first century should be labeled the African Spring). That both space and time are being transformed under the combined effect of the information technology and by social forms and processes induced by the currents of historical change is an obvious and hardly a new concept.

(Appadurai 1998; Castells 1989; Galloway 2004) However, while the information age was thought to have produced a space-time distanciation that resulted in a tearing of space-time from place leading to a decline in personal human interaction

as well as a decline of dense urban conditions, mobile technology and social media are in fact producing a collapse of space-time and place through time-sharing social practices that are not only transforming the traditional city of the well-worn “first-world/third-world” binary, but also transforming way that the problematics of the African city are re-conceptualized. (Giddens 1990) “New collective networks of expression” also characterizes processes through which new social and cultural communities form and new political structures emerge. These processes also produce spatial relationships over time that in turn will create “new collective spaces of expression.”

-------References: Africa and the Middle East: Telecom-Week, Table 1: South Africa – Important Economic Parameters.

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Andjelkovic, M. (2010). The Future is Mobile: Why Developing Country Entrepreneurs Can Drive Internet Innovation. In SAIS Review 30, no. 2: 121-133. Baltimore: John Hopkins Press.

Archambault J. S. (2012). Travelling while sitting down: Mobile phones, mobility and the communication landscape in Inhambane, Mozambique. In Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute 82, no.3: 393-412.

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Appadurai, A. (1998). Modernity at Large.

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Bremner, L. (1998). Crime and the Emerging Landscape of Post-Apartheid Johannesburg. In Blank- Architecture, Apartheid and After, edited by H. Judin and I. Vladislavić. Rotterdam: NAi; New York: Distributor, D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers.

Bremner, L. (2010). Writing the City into Being: Essays on Johannesburg, 1998-2008, edited by B. Law-Viljoen. Johannesburg: Fourthwall Books.

Castells, M. (1989). The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban-Regional Process. Oxford, UK; New York, NY, USA: B. Blackwell.

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Ferguson, J. (2006). Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press.

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Spatial Politics of Johnanesburg. Durham: Duke University Press.

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-------Global Africa Lab Mario Gooden, AIA and Mabel Wilson, PhD are co-directors of Global Africa Lab, a GSAPP Initiative.

Through design methods and research aided by new technologies and media, Global Africa Lab (GAL) explores the spatial topologies of the African continent and its diaspora. GAL’S s innovative research and pedagogical agenda examines how the unique political histories and the contemporary forces of globalization shape the architecture, urbanism, culture and ecologies of these places.

Letter to the Mayor Mpho Matsipa At Storefront for Art and Architecture Letters to the Mayor, was a group exhibition presenting letters written by 50 international architects to the political leaders of ten cities around the world. The show was on display at Storefront for Art and Architecture’s gallery from April 30 - May 24, 2014.

Drawing on the complex relationship between architecture and the political powers that influence the built environment, Letters to the Mayor expresses concerns and desires of architects and citizens in the construction of our cities.

The architect has the privilege and responsibility to articulate and translate the collective aspirations of an entire society, specifically those not able to sit at the decision-making tables. However, over the last two decades, the role of the architect in the political arena has often been reduced to answering questions that others have asked. Each letter, addressed to a prominent political figure in the author’s city, provides a space of reflection for the architects to brings ideas, desires and methodologies that might contribute to action within political spheres around the world. [source: Storefront for Art and Architecture] -------Dear Honourable Mayor Mpho Parks Tau, An eminent scholar of African cities once described Johannesburg as a city in a permanent condition of incompleteness and uncertainty.

[1] This is despite the attempts by powerful interests to codify it. Additionally, Johannesburg is a colonial city, in which governance and conceptions of citizenship and political public space were historically bifurcated, gendered and racialized.[2] Our city is indeed incomplete – however, it is this very in-completeness that creates conditions of possibility for us to imagine a city that is radically open to change and for a new progressive urban culture to emerge.

As you know well, Johannesburg went through a process of economic and social change in which new public art and architecture, were enlisted to restructure the symbolic orders of the city. This regime of representation differed from colonial iterations of nation-building, because it embodied

the aspirations of an inclusive, democratic nonracial nation-state.

However, many redevelopment projects in the inner city have thus far been circumscribed by the logic of market liberalization, privatization, and – to some degree - predatory capitalist accumulation.

In the aftermath of apartheid, city officials and corporate interests have sought to re-territorialize Johannesburg as an attractive global investment location, and as a site for blue and white collar cultural consumption and production. In so doing, they displaced many lower income residents and traders.

Many of these people were the causalities of economic restructuring throughout the southern African region, as well as the legacy of racialized dispossession and inequality under apartheid.

Therefore, the growth of corporate power in a context of neo-liberal capitalist expansion actually undermines the rights of vulnerable and marginalized groups,[3] while appearing to work towards greater social cohesion and democracy.

I do not wish to be-labour the role of public art nor the private sector in inner city real estate development here (others – including the recent Constitutional Court ruling against Operation “Clean Sweep” in April 2014- have chastised your office for the acute hardships inflicted on many inner city residents as a result of the violent evictions of over 6000 street traders from the inner city over a 3 month period.) I’m writing to you today, because I am interested in how the transformation of our ‘post’-apartheid city, promises to fulfil the promise of truly democratic and integrated city.

As you well know, Johannesburg is a complex city and the specificity of regeneration strategies in the inner city means that some of my remarks will be necessarily provisional. More importantly, they are set down in an attempt to appeal to your sense of justice and your capacity to imagine and shape our city – differently.

Within the discursive framework of market-drive urban renewal in Johannesburg and municipal interventions like “Operation Clean Sweep”, ‘the’ informal trader is the embodiment of disorder, which disrupts any notion of a unified and conflict-free social order. However, this figure is not marginal, but is rather an “acute manifestation of the uneven social relations”[4] within capitalist development, and an integral part of the city, which is situated at the very centre of neo-

liberal capitalist urban development. Thus rather than a figure of marginality and disorder your governments attempts to remove traders, speaks to the absences at the centre of your city visions and our desires for global belonging.

I invite you to seek out multiple kinds of global connection with all city residents that are empowering to all city residents. This means seeking out and listening to voices beyond the boardrooms or over a craft beer, or side walk café’s but also those other sites that we often overlook – or look away from: the sidewalk that functions as a site micro-retail and social interaction, the repurposed and underserviced office building that functions as a home for poor residents and a day-care centre, imaginative sites where artists re-invent the city in unanticipated and inclusive ways.

Migrant entrepreneurs are producing new, heterogeneous and creative spatialities in the inner city. In so doing, they also produce new regimes of representation and geographies of possibility in ways that disrupted the apparently stable places and identities of the city. Their appropriation of the public and commercial spaces of the city area manifestation of their agency and their ability to transform geographical and urban space, despite their marginalization.

These multiple geographies of informality and creativity need your attention and support, as emergent zones of sustainable livelihoods, opportunity and of vibrant inventiveness in the city.

If Johannesburg is to become a leading city on the continent and in the world, we need to think of it as a crucial site for urban invention and innovation - in urban policy and designpractices - from trading to housing typologies and new ways of being together under in response to growing urbanization on the continent. To the extent that it remains a relatively porous city, the lived spatialities that your office seems intent to erase, may challenge the limits of architectural and urban knowledge globally. In closing, I invite you to imagine new paradigm for re-shaping our city that recognizes peoples’ capacities to live with dignity, to claim rights to the city and to craft an alternative paradigm of development, for a truly democratic city.

Yours Sincerely, Mpho Matsipa Director, Studio-X Johannesburg

-------References: [1] Simone, A.M. 2004. “People as Infrastructure.”

Public Culture, 16 (3): 407-429; Duke University Press [2] Mamdani, M. 1996. Citizen and Subject Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton University Press.(Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History), pp 16 - 21 [3] Deutsche, R. 1998. “Agoraphobia” in Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics. MIT Press, pp 271-2 [4] Deutsche, R. 1998. Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics. MIT Press, pp 279

EVENTS AND EXHIBITIONS Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic Exhibition: 29 January - 25 April 2010, Tate Liverpool.

Conceived and developed by Tanya Barson, Curator of International Art at Tate Modern.

Curated by Tanya Barson and Peter Gorschlüter, Head of Exhibitions and Displays at Tate Liverpool.

Consultant Curator, Paul Goodwin.

This major exhibition, inspired by Paul Gilroy’s seminal book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), identifies a hybrid culture that spans the Atlantic, connecting Africa, North and South America, The Caribbean and Europe. The exhibition is the first to trace in depth the impact of Black Atlantic culture on Modernism and will reveal how black artists and intellectuals have played a central role in the formation of Modernism from the early twentieth century to today.From the influences of African art on the Modernist forms of artists like Picasso, to the work of contemporary artists such as Kara Walker, Ellen Gallagher and Chris Ofili, the exhibition will map out visual and cultural hybridity in modern and contemporary art that has arisen from the journeys made by people of Black African descent. [source: Tate Liverpool]

Listening There- Scenes from Ghana Exhibition: 2010, Studio-X New York City.

Mabel O. Wilson and Peter Tolkin.

Listening There: Scenes from Ghana examines African Modernism, specifically the modern architecture built in Ghana between the late 1940s and 1960s known as “Tropical Modernism.” Its photographs and videos were conceived of as a provocation rather than an exposition. The journeys to Kumasi, Accra, and the coast of Ghana by Mabel O. Wilson and Peter Tolkin were motivated by a desire to see how these buildings had fared in the half century since their construction, and to explore how they functioned in today’s increasingly urbanized and globalized contexts. [source: Studio-X New York] Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980 Exhibition: 21 October 2012 - 11 March 2013, MoMA PS1 Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980 chronicles the vital legacy of the African American arts community in Los Angeles, examining a pioneering group of black artists whose work and connections with other artists of varied ethnic backgrounds helped shape the

Kiluanji Kia Henda, Icarus 13 (detail) as shown in The Shadows Took Shape. [source: Studio Museum in Harlem]

creative output of Southern California. The exhibition presents approximately 140 works by thirty-two artists active during this historical period, exploring the rising strength of the black community in Los Angeles as well as the increasing political, social, and economic power of African Americans across the nation.

Several prominent black artists began their careers in the Los Angeles area, including Melvin Edwards, David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, Senga Nengudi, John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy, and Betye Saar. Their influence, like that of all of the artists in the exhibition, goes beyond their immediate creative circles and the geography of Los Angeles and is critical to a more complete and dynamic understanding of twentieth-century American Art. This exhibition was shown at the Hammer Museum, California from October 2, 2011 to January 8, 2012. [source: MoMA PS1] The Shadows Took Shape Exhibition: 14 November 2013 to 9 March 2014, The Studio Museum Harlem.

A interdisciplinary exhibition exploring contemporary art through the lens of Afrofuturist aesthetics. Coined in 1994 by writer Mark Dery in his essay “Black to the Future,” the term “Afrofuturism” refers to a creative and intellectual genre that emerged as a strategy to explore science fiction, fantasy, magical realism and panAfricanism. With roots in the avant-garde musical stylings of sonic innovator Sun Ra (born Herman Poole Blount, 1914–1993), Afrofuturism has been used by artists, writers and theorists as a way to prophesize the future, redefine the present and reconceptualize the past. The Shadows Took Shape will be one of the few major museum exhibitions to explore the ways in which this form of creative expression has been adopted internationally and highlight the range of work made over the past twenty-five years.

The exhibition draws its title from an obscure Sun Ra poem and a posthumously released series of recordings. Providing an apt metaphor for the long shadow cast by Sun Ra and others, the exhibition will feature more than sixty works of art, including ten new commissions, charting the evolution of Afrofuturist tendencies by an international selection of established and emerging practitioners. These works span not only personal themes of identity and self-determination in the African-American community, but also persistent concerns of techno-culture, geographies, utopias and dystopias, as well as universal

preoccupations with time and space. [source: The Studio Museum in Harlem] Film Screening and Discussion with Charlotte Ickes and Terri Francis Screening and Discussion: 23 February 2014, The Studio Museum in Harlem.

Organized in dialogue with the exhibition The Shadows Took Shape; guest curated by Charlotte Ickes, PhD Candidate, University of Pennsylvania, with discussant Terri Francis, Visiting Associate Professor, Cinema Studies, University of Pennsylvania.

Taking Sun Ra’s interest in moving images as a starting point, the Studio Museum presented a feature-length movie and short films that shed light on the complex aesthetic and thematic registers of an Afrofuturist imagination on screen.

Spanning the 1980s to today, the selection of films circles around questions of diasporic space and medium hybridity, borders and their undoing, longing for lost origins, technological intimacies, as well as time travel, alienation and alien-nations.

Featuring works by Jesse Atlas, Simon Rittmeier, John Sayles, and Cauleen Smith. [source: The Studio Museum in Harlem] Taking it to the Street: The Art of Public Life Exhibition: March 2014, Studio-X Johannesburg.

Curated by Tanya Gershon Taking it to the Street: The Art of Public Life explores the role of the street performer in the construction of a vibrant public sphere in Johannesburg, following years of segregation under apartheid rule. A longstanding history of surveillance, distrust and fear of public gathering persists in Johannesburg and across South Africa. This project seeks to create transparency between government cultural improvement strategies, ostensibly meant to bring art and heritage back into Johannesburg’s Central Business District (CBD), and the informal network of street artists independently fulfilling that directive. Through their personal stories, spatial visualizations and data collection, the research and corresponding exhibition analyzes the barriers that these artists continue to encounter as they attempt to access public space two decades into democracy.

The artists represented on the windows and walls of Studio X Johannesburg transcend the stereotype of the street performer. These men

and women work fulltime in a variety of professions during the week and provide public performances throughout their weekends, knowing that the cost of their commute to perform will likely outweigh any funds that they earn. Interviews with the artists are cataloged on the windows to illustrate the organized structure generated by street performers who come together through a shared love of music, dedication to their craft, persistence against adversity and powerful commitment to bring art and culture to the people. The biggest hurdle for the artists is gaining a platform to perform and their largest obstacle is obtaining a permit. Their successful navigation of the city and strategic placement elicits the question, how can urban planners and policy makers build upon the street performer’s knowledge of the city and engage them in a dialogue that creates meaningful sitespecific interventions rather than perpetuate a fragmented public infrastructure?

30 Days and A City Online Exhibition: 2014

By Rendani Missblacdropp

[source: Tanya Gershon, curator]

[source: Rendani Missblacdropp, graphic designer, JoburgMyHomeburg.blogspot.com]

This exhibition is a collaborative effort, which was initiated by Rendani Missblacdropp in 2014.

The aim of the exhibition is to bring together creatives and have them show the world how they experience the Johannesburg CBD through their various crafts. Each poster is a reflection of Rendani’s personal experiences with the public transport system in the Johannesburg CBD (mini bus taxis in particular) as well as how she interacts with the taxi rank and taxi space. There are five posters in total in this series. Each poster reflects what a typical taxi experience in Joburg is for Rendani (and those who use taxis on a regular). The posters were created digitally as well as hand drawings. Each of the titles is taken from phrases and street names that Joburg taxis frequent.

Nolan O. Dennis and Mr. Fuzzy Slippers, Taking it to the Street (detail). [source: Studio-X Johannesburg]

Tanya Gershon, Taking it to the Street (detail). [source: Studio-X Johannesburg]

Rendani Missblacdrop, 30 Days and A CIty (excerpts). [source: Rendani Missblacdop, JoburgMyHomeburg.blogspot.com]

Studio-X is a global network of advanced research laboratories for exploring the future of cities through the real-time exchange of projects, people, and ideas.

Global Network Programming 415 Avery Hall, Columbia GSAPP 1172 Amsterdam Avenue New York City, NY 10027 USA studiox@columbia.edu Amman Lab 5 Moh’d Al Sa’d Al-Batayneh Street King Hussein Park P.O. Box 144706 Amman 11814 Jordan Studio-X Beijing A103, 46 Fangjia Hutong, Andingmen Inner Street, Dongcheng District Beijing, China 100007 Studio-X Mumbai Kitab Mahal 192, D N Road Fort Mumbai 400 001 India Studio-X New York City 2008-2014 Studio-X Rio De Janeiro Praça Tiradentes, 48 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil São Paulo Lab Revolving locations Tokyo Lab Shibaura House 3-15-4 Shibaura, Minato-ku Tokyo, Japan 108-0023 Studio-X Istanbul Meclis-i Mebusan Caddesi 35A 34433 Salıpazarı, Istanbul, Turkey Studio-X Johannesburg Fox Street Studios, second floor 280 Fox Street (Corner Fox/Kruger) The Maboneng Precinct Johannesburg, South Africa Santiago Research Cell Av. Dag Hammarskjold 3269, 1st floor Vitacura, Santiago, Chile arch.columbia.edu/studio-x-global twitter.com/StudioXNYC

Radical Imaginaries in an Afro-Future City is a curated collaborative collection by Gregory Bugel, Marina Otero, Agustin Schang (Studio-X Global Network Programming) with the kind advice and suggestions from Kellie Jones (IRAAS, Columbia University), Mpho Matsipa (Studio-X Johannesburg) and Mabel O. Wilson (GSAPP, Columbia University).

With special thanks to all the contributors, to Ashley Hoefly, Gavin Browning and the Office of the Dean at GSAPP. Every effort has been made to assure accuracy in the information contained in this booklet.

However, due to the scope of this project, the Studio-X Global Network cannot guarantee complete accuracy of the material presented, and it is possible that something was omitted or misquoted.

This document is intended to provide a general overview of the subject of Afro-future city. For more detailed and up-to-date information, the reader is encouraged to review directly the sources listed here.