Imperative Conditionals

Black speculative thought and the co-designed futurity

My name is Florence.

As a designer, I'm interested in critical design practice, community led methodology and creating solutions for complex systems.

Introduction

This will be a collaborative experience where we'll be delving into speculative fiction as a tool for critical design.

There will be full screen gifs and animations used over the course of the presentation. This will be forewarned and marked with the sunglasses icon:

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Content Warning

1. The Question of AfroFuturism

2. Recursive Temporalities

3. Glitchified Presentism

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2. Recursive Temporalities

3. Glitchified Presentism

1. The Question of AfroFuturism

3. Glitchified Presentism

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1. The Question of AfroFuturism

2. Recursive Temporalities

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By focussing speculative expression solely through the medium of published textual fiction, we see an inadvertent 'unseeing' of how oppressive structures collude to mask the presence of the black person.

Credit: Quentin Babatunde VerCetty

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"What is compelling about Afrofuturism is that it is historical in its gesture back to previous debates about social responsibility, radical politics, and black artistic production that surged during the Black Arts Movement (or BAM) of the 60s and 70s...."

"....But it rearticulates these debates and expands our understandings of blackness’s multi-dimensionality, the good and the bad, the respectable and the undesirable."

--Tiffany Barber

"...[AfroFuturism is] a program for recovering the histories of counter-futures created in a century hostile to Afro- diasporic projection and as a space within which the critical work of manufacturing tools capable of intervention within the current political dispensation may be undertaken...."

--Kodwo Eshun, Further Considerations on AfroFuturism

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It is the reconfiguration of the timeline becomes the source of communal liberation.

"[The] glitch is a correction to the “machine”, and, in turn, a positive departure."

-- 'Digital Dualism and the Glitch feminism manifesto', Legacy Russell

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Thank you