Warpmode: Afronowism
Jazsalyn in conversation with Stephanie Dinkins
Black Beyond’s Warpmode is a conceptual card game and social experience created by artist Jazsalyn to stimulate conversations grounded in Black Metatheories: Afrofuturism, Afronowism, Afrovoidism, and Afropocalypse. In the game, players draw cards and respond to existential prompts to reconfigure Black social and theoretical frameworks.
The game has lent itself to a multipart series—co-presented by Onassis ONX and Pioneer Works, in partnership with Metalabel—in which Jazsalyn, the Artistic Director of Black Beyond, has curated sessions to converse with various artists who have deep insights into a focus metatheory, before inviting audience members to partake directly in Warpmode.
For the second session in this series, she and Stephanie Dinkins will engage the theme of Afronowism, drawing on the latter artist's “Secret Garden” installation in BAM exhibition TECHNE as a contextual reference. Genel Ambrose will moderate this conversation.
Black Beyond’s Warpmode: Afronowism session is part of TECHNE, an exhibition of four large-scale digital artworks at BAM, on view between January 4-19, 2025. TECHNE is curated by Onassis ONX, and presented by BAM, Onassis, and Under the Radar.
About the Artists
Jazsalyn is an ONX member and the creator of Black Beyond's Warpmode. Through alternative media and re-indigenization, her practice considers issues regarding data loss, memory restoration, and Ancestral Intelligence. She works with ancestral archives and space data to explore game engines, new AI models, and social experiences as a form of worlding counter-futures. As a lecturer at The New School, she has built curricula on African and Diaspora rituals as speculative technology. She is the Artistic Director of the experimental curatorial project Black Beyond, where she has curated exhibitions and experiences to envision alternate realities for Blackness with Serpentine Arts Technologies, Pioneer Works, ONX Onassis, The New School and more. Afropocalypse is a new conceptual framework by Jazsalyn featured in Warpmode and a forthcoming exhibition. Afropocalypse seeks to reframe Afropessimism through the context of survival and regeneration despite multidimensional periods of apocalypse in Black and Indigenous communities.
Stephanie Dinkins is a transmedia artist who creates experiences that spark dialog about race, gender, aging, and our future histories. Her work in AI and other mediums uses emerging technologies and social collaboration to work toward technological ecosystems based on care and social equity. Dinkins’ experiences with and explorations of artificial intelligence have led to a deep interest in how algorithmic systems impact communities of color in particular and all of our futures more generally. Dinkins’ experiments with AI have led full circle to recognize the stories, myths, and cultural perspectives, aka data, that we hold and share and inform society and have done so for millennia. She has concluded that our stories are our algorithms. We must value, grow, respect, and collaborate with each other’s stories (data) to build care and broadly compassionate values into the technological ecosystems that increasingly support our future.
Genel Ambrose is a cultural strategist and founder of Good Mirrors Institute, an organization committed to nurturing the holistic wellbeing and impact potential of Black women and girls. A first-generation Caribbean American from Flatbush, Brooklyn, she is also a mother of three girls. To address bias faced by Black women and girls online and within society-at-large, Genel is building Good Mirrors Index, an encyclopedia of Black femme consciousness and a digital resource on topics related to and concerning Black women. Alongside Ms. Tina Knowles, Genel is also the co-curator of WITNESS, an immersive visual arts exhibition and national tour that invites viewers to look alongside Black women to witness what they might not otherwise see on their own. A graduate of The New School, Genel received her MFA in Creative Writing, Nonfiction and a dual bachelors in Journalism and Sociology from New York University.
About Warpmode
Black Beyond’s Warpmode is a conceptual card game and social experience created by Jazsalyn to stimulate conversations grounded in Black Metatheories: Afrofuturism, Afronowism, Afrovoidism, and Afropocalypse. Through public discussions catalyzed by game-play, the Warpmode program series provokes collective re-thinkings of accepted reality. Each session is curated by Jazsalyn to include a featured artist and moderator-guide who have deep insights into the focus metatheory. Ultimately, Warpmode as a card game and program series designed to open up an expanded space for intentional, anti-hierarchical conversations through Black metatheories.
Warpmode is created by Jazsalyn, Artistic Director, Black Beyond, and available on Metalabel.com.
Black Beyond’s Warpmode Series is co-presented by Onassis ONX and Pioneer Works in partnership with Metalabel.