blk banaana
An (Other) Intelligence
Experiments for interconnected belonging in a computational present.
Questions//
How might we visualise the re-construction of the ‘fragmented self’, and by extension, the histories and trajectories produced by this state?
What is the role of imagination in the preservation of our memories?
In what ways might we approach identity construction as a process of deep imagination and re-coding?
How do we affirm alternative modes of reimagining our histories and futures from the point of understanding them as intrinsically fragmented?
What effect do our data fragments – in the form of dreams, myths, memories, bodies, cells, spirits – have in the inevitability of artificial intelligence?
How are we being included? How are we being excluded?
How can AI be used as a tool for the preservation of our memories, and in the continued project of imaginative resilience?
The present is a computerised dreamscape running on the power of bodies not found.
Not lost.
‘We’
The kidnapped, the convo-looted, the coded.
With curls packed tight with the liquid of our sea-fearing ancestors
Who turned and were turned to water.
And ‘We’
Who carried mirrors and memories ashore
Crossing and connecting the wires of the universe.
With each story remembered.
carried.
And re-told.
“‘We’, that is the colonised, have gradually and necessarily ‘acquired a taste for obscurity’. The need for the colonised to seek out ‘that which is not obvious’, to situate [our]selves within a discourse of complexity could be understood as the principle that animates each community’s ‘right to a shared obscurity’”.
Kodwo Eshun “Drexciya as Spectre”, Matter Fictions, Margarida Mendes Ed. Sternberg Press, 2017
How to treat our identities as a site of chaos? Or more specifically, to engage with the chaotic circumstances under which our ancestors ensured their own survival, thus ensuring ours?
The childlike imagination of nature is timelessly making multiple phases of itself.
While we watch and pretend to forget that we are part.
Our spirits and eyes transfixed by the white light distraction of webs being wound around us.
This permeable film of fragility.
Bondage made of shot nerves and tight blood veins.
Body and mind dismembered.
Our spirits dissected.
broken down into digestible cubes
Running from our boundless potential to remember who we are.
Wound tight by the binds and binaries of the million legged lusus naturae.
The freak of nature.
With fingers that curl around the heartstrings of our timelessness.
Striking false chords of disharmony.
On a rampage to reform and reprogramme our cells.
Designating and developing an artificial pattern of the source.
This devil of divine design.
Who makes mirrors look like portals to the unattainable.
Dividing and deleting what we’ve known since we were juice.
Joyfully splitting and joining.
And splitting and joining again.
III.
It’s not all the pus that leaves at once.
First it is the stench that slips through the resilient crack.
Then, festering bubbles protest through the careless sutures of this half healed scar.
Once a brutal gash.
Pulsating warm blood escaping profusely. Capillaries grasping for more. A life of sentence.
This burdened cellular construction.
Black and fertile.
Fighting the pain of a poison administered with the precision of a jagged porcelain arrow.
I know it is not my memory but it belongs to me intimately.
I wake up from this dream exhausted.
Stiffness builds up in my stomach.
A stiffness as strong as a fist with taut muscles holding back black spit curling out from my body.
“We don’t owe anyone coherence.”
– Julie Nxadi