Black Beyond: Warpmode with Tamar Clarke-Brown and Jazsalyn, featuring Dreamcrusher

Onassis ONX and Pioneer Works co-present an activation of a new Metalabel project, Black Beyond’s Warpmode, during Group Hug at WSA. The program will feature a conversation between curator Tamar Clarke-Brown, Serpentine Arts Technologies, who commissioned artist Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s work in Group Hug; and artist Jazsalyn, the Artistic Director of Black Beyond. Moderated by Salome Asega, the conversation will be followed by a performance from Dreamcrusher.

Black Beyond’s Warpmode is a conceptual card game and thought experiment that challenges accepted reality while stimulating abstract conversations about Black metatheories. In the game, players draw cards and respond to existential prompts to reconfigure Black social and theoretical frameworks such as Afrofuturism, Afronowsim, Afrovoidism, and Afropocalypse.

For this activation—the first in the Warpmode program series—Asega will guide Clarke-Brown and Jazsalyn in an exploration of black metatheories. Following the discussion, attendees are invited to play Warpmode together, accompanied by a live soundscape and then performance by Dreamcrusher.

This event will be recorded, livestreamed and archived on Serpentine Arts Technologies Twitch channel. If you are joining online, you’ll need to make a free Twitch account to watch and interact with the chatroom.

Jazsalyn is an ONX member and the creator of Black Beyond's Warpmode. As an artist and technologist, she works where fiction and reality collide. Through alternative media and re-indigenization her work considers new data models and memory restoration to preserve Ancestral Intelligence. Jazsalyn is the Artistic Director of the experimental curatorial project Black Beyond and teaches at The New School where she has written studio coursework on African and Diaspora rituals as speculative technology. Afropocalypse is a new conceptual framework by Jazsalyn featured in Warpmode and a forthcoming exhibition. Afropocalypse seeks to extend and reframe Afropessimism through the context of loss, regeneration, and the multidimensional cycles of apocalypse.

Tamar Clarke-Brown is an artist, writer, and Curator of Arts Technologies at Serpentine. Her work centers alternative mythologies and diasporic practices, with a special focus on platforming underrepresented and overlooked imaginaries. At Serpentine, her work involves commissioning new artworks, events, research and R&D projects engaged with experimental worldbuilding and exploring the untapped civic and social potential of technologies. Most recently she commissioned and curated the collaborative video game project, web3 tokens and exhibition Third World: The Bottom Dimension, led by Brazilian artist Gabriel Massan. Currently she is working with artist, game designer and archivist of Black trans stories, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley for a new interactive game commission, exhibition and R&D project opening at Serpentine North Autumn 2025.

Salome Asega is an artist and researcher exploring models for technology and its development that are cooperative, distributed, and people-centered. Asega is the Director of NEW INC, an art, design, and technology incubator program at the New Museum that offers artists professional development, mentorship, and shared workspace. She is a co-founder of POWERPLNT, a digital art collaboratory in Brooklyn, also sits on the boards of the Jerome Foundation, the National Performance Network, and School for Poetic Computation. She has participated in residencies and fellowships with Eyebeam, the New Museum, The Laundromat Project, and Recess and has exhibited at the 11th Shanghai Biennale, MoMA, the Carnegie Library, the August Wilson Center, the Knockdown Center, and more. She has given presentations and lectures at festivals and academic institutions, including Performa, Eyeo, the Brooklyn Museum, MIT Media Lab, Carnegie Mellon University, Gather Stockholm, and New York University. Asega received her MFA from Parsons at The New School in Design and Technology, where she teaches classes on speculative design and participatory design methodologies.

Dreamcrusher is a Brooklyn-based noise musician from Wichita, Kansas. Dreamcrusher has been the subject of features in The Village Voice, Pitchfork, and FADER, praised in SPIN and VICE. Dreamcrusher's work has also been discussed in scholarly articles in the fields of musicology and queer/affect theory.

Warpmode is created by Jazsalyn, Artistic Director, Black Beyond, and launches on Metalabel on October 22, 2024.

The Warpmode programming series is co-presented by Onassis ONX and Pioneer Works, in partnership with Metalabel. This iteration is also co-presented with Serpentine Arts Technologies.