2020 | Multi-media web based project
Collaborators | Takeria Blunt
Twenty-six-nineteen is an Afrofuturist remix of computing in the anthropocene. The project begins with the critique that both computing and the anthropocene are often told as a single story, one that ignores the multitude of origins and experiences related to each. For example, concerns about climate change and computing waste often overlook the unbalanced impact of e-waste and the slow crisis that emerges from pollution and toxicity related to it. Additionally, definitions that date the Anthropocene to the mid-20th century, fail to consider the multitude of anthropocenic experiences that predate this period, such as those associated with colonization. Remixing is used to resist the single story instead building on multiple origins and experiences. We interpret remixing as both a technique and a broader project. As a technique, it is a process of gathering and curating by sourcing elements from other works, editing, recombination, and adding new components. As a project, remixing is a repositioning of our conceptions of computing itself.
The site is a mixtape. It imagines the world of Twenty-Six-Nineteen as a future that spurs from these other origins and anthropocentric stories. Remixing occurs in multiple ways. We build on the taxonomies of remixing to reconsider computing and the anthropocene in the past, present, and future. Like DJ mixtapes, the remixing is layered with references, narratives, and positions that seek to extend “Afrofuturism-the-project” and present new ideas about the design of technology. The library is like the DJ crates, full of material that can be sampled in a remix. The text is remixed through a sampling of literature composed with new strings of text created by us. The collage images pull from meaningful references that are at the center of the ideas explored through each track. And the mixes themselves employ techniques of remixing, both conceptually and materially.
