Intersectional Conditionals
My name is Florence.
I am a User EXperience Designer, interested in critical design, complex systems, open access and decolonising... things.
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 Black Spec-fic
2. Ride of the Afronauts
3. Does Africa dream of Androids?
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Go to: http://bit.ly/2Kwj2NK
Afronauts or Androids?
1. The Question of Black Spec-fic
2. Ride of the Afronauts
3. Does Africa dream of Androids?
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Go to: http://bit.ly/2z0ZkoG
Black speculative fiction or Androids?
1. The Question of Black Spec-fic
2. Ride of the Afronauts
3. Does Africa dream of Androids?
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Go to: http://bit.ly/2lF5pxQ
Black speculative fiction or Afronauts?
1. The Question of Black Spec-fic
2. Ride of the Afronauts
3. Does Africa dream of Androids?
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Where are all the black sci-fi writers?
"...African-Americans... are the descendants of alien abductees..."
"...they inhabit a sci-fi nightmare [where] unseen force fields of intolerance frustrate their movements..."
"...and technology is too often brought to bear on black bodies..."
Have you tried... listening to black music?
"...part of the whole thing about being an African- American alien musician, is that there’s this sense of the human as being a really pointless and treacherous category..."
"It’s in music that you get this sense that most African-Americans owe nothing to the status of the human. African-Americans still had to protest, still had to riot, to be judged Enlightenment humans in the 1960s..."
"...a category which has never meant anything to African-Americans."
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.
Go to: http://bit.ly/2MxtDoY
Let's go deeper...
1. AfroFuturism 2.0 a.k.a. What's Equianoh got to do with it?
2. Sonic Fiction a.k.a. Cyborgian delights give way to revolutionary ends?
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It is in the realm of sonic fiction that one can most clearly see black creatives engaging with themes common in "mainstream" sci-fi
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The cyborg embodies revolution via technology, travelling through time and space to inspire others to join the fight.
Let me be clear: When I speak of androids, I am speaking of the new form of the ‘other.’ You can parallel that to people who are gay or lesbian, those whose skin is considered too dark; women [who] still are not receiving equal rights.
In conclusion...
By focussing on "pulp", Derry's query is unable to account for the black contribution to social futurism
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Any genre or aesthetic which addresses problematics related to the black experience cannot be confined to a single medium, because such problematics are multi-media by nature.
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However, by deliberately placing the black person in a futurist context, there is both an implicit question of who is envisioned in the future and a challenge as to how we are going to get there.
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Next storyline...
To the future..?
Scenario:
"In our ongoing commitment to socialist principles, the Zambian government invites people from all nations to partake in designing an open source intra-solar communal hub"
-Excerpt from Space 20xx Manifesto, 2014
Go to: http://bit.ly/2yQcOUi
Is Space the Place?
The images are beautiful and the story is pleasant at a first level, but it is built on the fact that nobody believes that Africa will ever reach the moon. It hides a very subtle critique to our position towards the whole continent and our prejudices.
- CRISTINA DE MIDDEL, Afronauts
Situating the scenario in an alternative future allows us to think more broadly; the details of this alternative future are what help ground our ideation
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Next storyline...
To the future..?
Design is a revelatory practice
Go to: http://bit.ly/2KxQa7G
Terminator or Salvation?
Next storyline...
To the future..?
We create as we dream. How we understand our relationship with our environments, the technologies can make and each other are intimately bound and tangled. We must be wary as we fantasies futures anew.
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You can follow me
@FINOkoye on twitter
Thank you
I facilitate design and masquerade workshops
Digital service design is my jam and sometimes I work freelance!
Credit to Matteo Menapace (@baddeo on twitter) for the concept