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ANANSI Revolutionary Collective
2022︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎
INTERNATIONAL
The ANANSI Revolutionary Collective (ARC000) is a pro-Black, pan-African arts collective that stewards a commons of material resources, infrastructure, people-power, and knowledge. The collective is the steward of the emergent ANANSI philosophy, which is one of Black holistic distribution, seeking to disrupt mass centralization across various disciplines. The collective continually experiments with an emergent collection of collaborative praxis, including collective budgeting, consensus-based decision making, rotational responsibility, reparational funding, and collective mythmaking. We are building a governance model structured around a participatory protocol, which will include guidelines around membership, voting, praxis and project management, and altering the protocol.
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DisCO.coop
2022
BALTIMORE
AMSTERDAM
SPAIN
NAIROBI
DisCO.coop is a non-profit cooperative that produces models for ethical collaborative productive labor in the digital era. They incubate and promote practices that integrate care-based cultural practices, guided learning journeys, and DLT-based technological tools.
They are the creators and stewards of the DisCO (Distributed Cooperative Organisation) philosophy, an organisational model for cooperative groups that combines ideas and practices from cooperativism, the commons, P2P and feminist economics.
During my time with DisCO.coop, I co-designed and facilitated workshops in Baltimore, Amsterdam, and Cape Town; provided my expertise on techno-politics and digital tools both internally and in consideration for the pending Pink Paper; connected the organization with my network of ethical technologists and changemakers; and offered continual highly considered feedback on the outward facing and inwardly practiced philosophy and praxis.
During my time with DisCO.coop, I co-designed and facilitated workshops in Baltimore, Amsterdam, and Cape Town; provided my expertise on techno-politics and digital tools both internally and in consideration for the pending Pink Paper; connected the organization with my network of ethical technologists and changemakers; and offered continual highly considered feedback on the outward facing and inwardly practiced philosophy and praxis.
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Currents.fm
2021
INTERNATIONAL
Currents.fm is an online music streaming platform designed to create sustainable financial support for musicians and collectives. Rather than paying into the platform, fans subscribe or pay one-off “tips” to artists directly. In addition to the namesake music platform, Currents also developed COMMON, a digital club venue that enabled viewers to tip and subscribe to artists during their performances, and to discover new music organically by navigating the site much like one would a festival grounds.
As one of the first employees of the company, I played a critical role in its founding, and saw my job shapeshifting to fit the needs of our artists. My primary focus was on creating a real, caring community. I developed and maintained various initiatives to support and connect artists, including: hosting regular "town hall" events to provide a safe environment for artists to connect with each other on a personal level, establishing and maintaining an asynchronous chat server for ongoing conversations between artists, and experimenting with scheduled and adhoc community events. I also conducted research and experimentation with decentralized and distributed networks, as well as virtual, physical, and hybrid artist communities. From a more creative stand point, I regularly produced, curated, and assisted with our digital festivals including A Moment In Between and 黑美.
As one of the first employees of the company, I played a critical role in its founding, and saw my job shapeshifting to fit the needs of our artists. My primary focus was on creating a real, caring community. I developed and maintained various initiatives to support and connect artists, including: hosting regular "town hall" events to provide a safe environment for artists to connect with each other on a personal level, establishing and maintaining an asynchronous chat server for ongoing conversations between artists, and experimenting with scheduled and adhoc community events. I also conducted research and experimentation with decentralized and distributed networks, as well as virtual, physical, and hybrid artist communities. From a more creative stand point, I regularly produced, curated, and assisted with our digital festivals including A Moment In Between and 黑美.
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ANANSI Radio Club: Pilot Broadcast2023
NAIROBI
During the Occupy The Mall festival in Nairobi, Kenya, I had the pleasure of participating in Santuri Electronic Music Academy’s Santuri Signal
360° livestream broadcast.
For the performance, I live coded a track using SonicPi, played music and audio art pieces by from a number of my aliases (including SUNJIR0 and A9C-388), played a recording of the prose piece the pines and performed four pieces of poetry live. The goal for the set was to create an “alien radio broadcast” featuring out-of-this-realm music and writing from a number of my aliases scattered around the pluriverse, as well as to pilot a platform for the ANANSI Revolutionary Collective to do future radio broadcasts.
360° livestream broadcast.
For the performance, I live coded a track using SonicPi, played music and audio art pieces by from a number of my aliases (including SUNJIR0 and A9C-388), played a recording of the prose piece the pines and performed four pieces of poetry live. The goal for the set was to create an “alien radio broadcast” featuring out-of-this-realm music and writing from a number of my aliases scattered around the pluriverse, as well as to pilot a platform for the ANANSI Revolutionary Collective to do future radio broadcasts.
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Nafasi Art Space/əbˈstrakt/
2023
DAR ES SALAAM
- In July and August of 2023, I had the pleasure of completing a residency at the Nafasi Art Space in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. Throughout the five weeks, I produced works across a variety of digital media and printed a limited collection of transparent works. The residency culminated in the show /əbˈstrakt/.
- In the rich tapestry of language, "abstract" emerges as a word of contradictions – Merriam-Webster alone presents 15 variations, each wrestling for dominance. This exhibition, /əbˈstrakt/, stands at the crossroads of these linguistic tensions. The most obvious of these tensions is between the almost anarchic adjective used to describe aesthetics that hide or obfuscate their meaning and the more authoritarian verb used to reduce complex subjects and phenomena into simpler and more convenient terms. This exhibition exists in the no man's land of this war of the words, delving into the clash between an unruly aesthetic and a commanding reduction, wielding their clash as a narrative force.
At its core, this collection unravels the violence inherent in abstraction, while making use of aesthetics that defy easy interpretation. The exhibit showcases an array of digital creations – VR spaces, 3D models and paintings, vivid 2D images crafted with Blender, and video art.
SUN JIR0 masterfully transcends the utilitarian boundaries often ascribed to digital art. With creations birthed not for practicality, but for the sake of art itself, the artist subverts the norm of the media. This collection is the result of an embodied and expressive approach to creation, with the artist making work often directly in virtual reality, to expand the artistic rather than technological bounds of the medium.
This exhibition comprises a number of component series that all came to a head during SUN JIR0’s residency with Nafasi Art Space. Featured in this collection are pieces from the “Caste” series of abstract geometric 3D models; “Virtual Geography,” a series of renders and 3D models of landscapes made in VR; “Panoption,” a series of 2D image renders that make heavy use of transparency; and “Any Other Name,” a collection of pieces ranging 3D models and 2D renders that tackle the themes of the exhibition more broadly.
