AstroBlackness

Type:	Dataset
Number of words:	236.450
Unique words:	21.891
Source(s):	aaaaarg.fail
Developed by:	Sun Ra, James L. Wolf, Harttnut Geerken, Alondra Nelson, Octavia Butler, Gerry Canavan, Algolit

On the 26th of October Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam organised an evening of technological speculation based around the topic of decolonising algorithms. UX and service designer Florence Okoye asked the questions: how can we embody an understanding of technology as revelation? and how would an AstroBlack technologist interpret the Agile methodology?

Inspired by her talk, this dataset doesn't aim to find answers, but rather propose a collective exercise in imagination. According to Ytasha Womack, “Afrofuturism views race as a technology, a man-made creation with power imbalances and seeks to heal this idea of separation in humanity.” At a time when technology embeds the skewed ideas of equality that most societies have, we can ask ourselves what would a machine learn from Afrofuturist data?

The selected books in this dataset are:

• The Immeasurable Equation. The Collected Poetry and Prose by Sun Ra. Compiled and edited by James L. Wolf and Harttnut Geerken
• Social Text - Afrofuturism. Issue 71. 2002. Edited by Alondra Nelson
• Octavia E. Butler - Modern Masters of Science Fiction. By Gerry Canavan