While this is a documentation project as a part of the upcoming immerive futures symposium in Bristol, for me, at its core lies an ongoing personal experiment in using Afrofuturism in meaning-making. As part of my studies at UoB, I'm exploring what it means to be an Afrofuturist artist and scholar, and how that hybrid identity co-creates who I am as an critical adult educator, as an emerging education researcher and as a lifelong critic of colonialized systems and structures that hyjack liberatory approaches to making sense of our world.
During the filming of the Star Trek spin-off TV show, Deep Space Nine, Avery Brookes, the black actor who played the space station captain Ben Sisko, was flooded with racist hate-mail describing how a black man could/should never be a captain of a ficticious, future space station. Despite the massive popularity of the show and its reputation for bucking traditional Star Trek tropes and dealing directly with issues around coloniality, this unceasing stream of hate motivated Avery to take some action. During season 6 of the show, in an effort to address this onslaught of racist bile, Avery consulted with show writers, and oversaw/directed the episode "Far Beyond the Stars". In the episode, a mystical alien artefact transports Sisko's consousness into the body of a Black sci-fi writer in a 1950's US city. This character, Benny Russell, must deal with both the coarse violence and the deep and subtle structural threads of anti-black racism in the US. In the wonderful, looping, Afrofuturist non-linear timeline that emerges, Benny Russell writes about a black captain in a far-future speculative universe, Capt. Sisko, and as that narrative of time twists back on itself, he explores the grotesque, layered and insidious nature of racism in our world(s).
In what many Trek fans consider one of the most moving and beautifully acted moments in the Star Trek universe, Brookes surfaces ways that racism minimize us all. The closing scene (no spoilers!) moved me to my core as a young man, and has stayed with me as an iconic moment of Afrofuturistic explortion of race, Afrofuturism and the role for sci-fi in surfacing the temporal violence of anti-black racism. Not only is the character study deeply moving and impactful, the narrative jumps out from the speculative timeline and cross-polinates into our here-and-now. This is Avery Brookes trying to make some sense of the racism he's suffering by giving life to a Star Trek sci-fi character trying, in turn, to make some sense of the racism he's suffering, by writing the character that Avery Brookes plays in our here-and-now. I'm leveraging elements of this looping sci-fi construct - what I'm referring to as a trans-temporal feedback loop (in partial reference to Afrofuturist scholar Isiah Lavender's concept of the trans-historial feedback loop) - to link Afrofuturist speculative temporalities via a feedback loop to fuel and feed my exploration of Afrofuturistic engagements with racism in this here and now by creating counter-narratives that empower a critical engagament with what-ifs, whys, how-could-they-have's, and how-could-that-have-happened's.
I've 'personified' the artistic side of my current academic work as an Afrofuturist character - a far-future, hybrid human-AI creature who likes to call themself Benny Russell. In this Afrofuturtistic speculative timeline, Benny and their fellow hybrids refer to themselves as Quantum Cartographers. Living in mutliple simultaneous realities, they piece together identities by creating feedback loops between realities - trans-temporal feedback loops - and Benny is particularly drawn to places where historical humans, from their perspective(s), connect play, imagination and creativity with thought-made-purpose, meaning-making and the pursuit of equity and justice. This lead character, Benny Russell, is particularly fond of black creative culture (music, art, dance, moviing image, pop literature such as comics, etc.) aligned with black struggles for freedom and liberty, and as such has landed on Afrofuturism as a central tool for (re)creating their identity. The Star Trek character Benny Russell (i.e., Avery Brookes/Capt. Sisko's alternate 1950's life) in our here-and-now has deep resonance for them, and they have used this to assemble a quantum cartography project about mapping futures studies and futurists in their pasts. :)
"As an attempt to engage with the task of documenting some of the emergent, collaborative meaning-making that can occur during the symposium in late Feb 2026, the Quantum Cartographers have noted this gathering of futures 'thinkers and tinkerers' as an inflection point. They have decided to materialize an artefact in our here-and-now to create a quantum cartographic waypoint. That is, a shared memory materialized into object form - one that other quantum cartographers (and us), through time, can locate themselves by and note this gathering of futures thinkers and tinkerers. As Benny Russell is leading this team, the object they have chosen is an Afrofuturistic music album. Since the event is taking place in Bristol, the birthplace of Trip Hop, it is partially shaped by the black cultural, temporal residue of that movement, and the music will be of that style. They are eager to collect fragments of audio from all who have gathered to conspire to build more playful, creative and liberatory futures - all of us. "
As an Afrofuturist electronic artist and aspiring scholar, some of the things I'm curious about in this project include:
I'm asking/suggesting that we collaborate on this project. I'd love to engage with you, your creative take on futures work and together, explore how we could assemble sonic fragements - sounds, music, words, etc. - in this work. I've created a 'sonic substrate' that you could consider my current part of the collaboration (listen to snippets for a taste here). It has both beat-driven trip hop segments, and more athmospheric, 'instrumental' sonic textures that you could think about adding sounds and words to. Does this music make you want to try rap, to write/perform slam poetry, to experiement with found sounds you can record on your phone, from your home, on your travels here, do you want to shout something to the world, to laugh and have that recorded for future futurists, to connect with colleagues and co-produce some words ... what sounds does this symposium, this substrate and this collaboration idea evoke for you?
I plan to create a final concept album pieced together from your sounds and my music. I'll place this online for all to listen to once finished, and will press up a limited number of vinyl LPs as materialized, tangible artefacts.
I invite you to play - to imagine your way into a future sonic memory of the symposium. Please contact me if you have any broader ideas or want to collaborate on the musical elements too - daren.okafo@bristol.ac.uk.