This Year's Afrofuturism Conference Is About Going Viral While Black
This year’s Afrofuturism Conference—happening April 29 to May 1 in New York—will be a series of “art happenings, performances, lectures, panels, workshops, film music, scholarly works, and community events” organized by students from The New School.
Like last year, the conference will explore “Afrofuturism as a cultural and aesthetic movement for the radical emancipation of people of color,” but with a particular focus on virality.
At last year's conference, artists, students and academics came together to discuss designing new narratives to empower the African Diaspora. Check out some of the wonderful images from last year on their Facebook page.
As the organizers put it, this year's conference will “explore the virality of blackness by hacking the cultural divide to explore the matrix of Afrofuturism as a narrative for liberation." The conference will also examine the platforms and products of black content creators online as art, language, and tools of subversion.
Some of the topics to be discussed:
-The Impact of Online Black Subcultures-From URL TO IRL - Futures of Black Movement Making
-On Hashtags as Creating Virtual Community Space
-Bioethical Justice in Black Communities
-The Pros and Perils of Black Hyper Visibility Online
-Memes as (Coded) Language
-Commodification of Black Image in the Media
-Conjuring Black Futures
-On Exclusivity in the CareFree Black Girl Movement
-Intergenerational Community Building
-The State of Black Cinema Post #OscarsSoWhite
-Futuristic Aesthetics - New Narratives in Media
-Real Recognize Reel - A Filmmakers Mixer
-Breaking Down Gender Binaries / Queering Spaces
-Politics of The Black Body in Viral Dannce
-Speaking in Black Tongues - Linguistics as a Site of Appropriation
-Cyber Serenity Sessions : Black Alternative Healing Methods
-Black design/technologies/invention/coding.zip
Confirmed participants as of April 18 include:
Cleopatra Reynolds of The Audre Lorde Project
