Tag Archives: Slate Magazine

Afrofuturism in the UK’s Guardian newspaper and as a Future Tense Dec. 2015 event

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My introduction to the term, Afrofuturism was in a March 11, 2015 posting by Jessica Bland for the Guardian in the Technology/Political Science section. It was written on the occasion of a then upcoming FutureFest event,

This is unapologetically connected to FutureFest, the festival Nesta (where I work) is holding this weekend in London Bridge. These thoughts represent the ideas that piqued my interest while curating talks and exhibits based on the thought experiment of a future African city-superpower. George Clinton, Spoek Mathambo, Tegan Bristow and Fabian-Carlos Guhl (from Ampion Venture Bus) will be speaking during the weekend. Thomas Aquilina is displaying photographs from his trip and the architects of the Lagos 2060 project will take part in a debate on whether their fiction can lead to a different kind of future.

In anticipation of the March 2015 FutureFest event, Bland had  written a roundup piece about “New sounds from South Africa and Nigeria’s urban science fiction [that] could change the future of technology and the city.” Here are some excerpts from her piece (Note: Links have been removed),

Strong stories or visions of the future stick around. The 1920s sci-fi fantasy of a jetpack commute still pops up in discussions about the future of technology, not to mention as an option on the Citymapper travel app. By co-opting or creating new visions of the future, it seems possible to influence the development of new products and services – from consumer tech to urban infrastructure. A new generation of African artists is taking over the mantle of Afrofuturist arts from a US-centred crowd. They could bring a welcome change to how technology is developed in the region, as well as a challenge to the dominance of imported plans for urban development.

Last Thursday’s London gig from Fantasma was sweaty and boisterous. It was also very different from the remix of Joy Division’s She’s Lost Control that brought front man Spoek Mathambo to the attention of a global audience a couple of years ago. Fantasma is a group of South African musicians with different backgrounds. Guitarist Bhekisenzo Cele started the gig with three of his own songs, introducing the traditional Zulu maskandi music that they went on to mix with shangaan electro, hiphop, punk, electronica and everything in between.

The gig had a buzz about it. But the performance was from a new collective trying things out; it wasn’t as genre-smashing as expected. And expectations ride high for Spoek. In 2011, he titled a collection from his back catalogue ‘Beyond Afrofuturism’. He took on, at least in name, a whole Afro-American cultural movement: embodied by musicians like Sun Ra, George Clinton and Drexciya. A previous post on this blog by Chardine Taylor-Stone describes the roots of Afrofuturism in science fiction that centres on space travel and human enhancement. But she goes on to say: “Afrofuturism also goes beyond spaceships, androids and aliens, and encompasses African mythology and cosmology with an aim to connect those from across the Black Diaspora to their forgotten African ancestry.” Spoek shares what he calls a cultural lineage with this movement. But he is not Afro-American. He also shares a cultural lineage with the sounds of South African musicians he grew up listening to.

…

Other forms of art are taking an increasingly activist role in the future of technology. Lydia Nicholas’s description of the relationship between Douglas Adam’s fictional Hitchhiker’s Guide and the real life development of the iPad shows how science fiction can effortlessly influence the development of new technology.

The science fiction collection Lagos 2060 is a more purposeful intervention. Published in 2013, it speculates about what it will be like to live in Lagos 100 years after Nigeria gained independence from the UK. It was born out of a creative writing workshop initiated by DADA books in Lagos. Foundation director of DADA, Ayodele Arigbabu, described the collection and other similar video and visual art work (in an email): “Far more than aesthetic indulgence, these renditions are a calibration of the changes deemed necessary in today’s political, technical and cultural infrastructure.”

Bland also explores a history of this movement,

Gaston Berger was the Senegalese founder of the academic journal Prospectiv in 1957. To many, he was the first futurist, or at least one of the first people to describe themselves as one. He founded promotes the practice of playing out the human consequences of today’s action. This is about avoiding a fatalistic approach to the future: about being proactive and provoking change, as much as anticipating it.

Berger’s early work spawned a generation, and then another and another, of professional futurists. They work in different ways and different places. Some are in government, enticing and frightening politicians with the prospect of a different transport system, healthcare sector or national security regime. Some are consultants to large companies, offering advice on the way that trends like 3D printing or flying robots will change their sector. An article from 1996 does a good job of summarising the principles of this movement: don’t act like an ostrich and ignore the future by putting your head in the sand; don’t act like a fireman and just respond to threats to your future; and don’t focus just on insurance against for the future.

Bland has written an interesting and sprawling piece, which in some way reflects the subject. Africa is a huge and sprawling continent.

Slate, a US online magazine, is hosting along with New America and Arizona State University a Future Tense event on Afrofuturism but this seems to be quite US-centric. From the Future Tense Afrofuturism event webpage on the Slate website (Note: Links have been removed),

Future Tense is hosting a conversation about Afrofuturism in New York City on December 3rd, 2015 from 6:30-8:30 p.m.

Afrofuturism emphasizes the intersection of black cultures with questions of imagination, liberation, and technology. Rooted in works like those of science fiction author Octavia Butler, avant-garde jazz legend Sun Ra, and George Clinton, Afrofuturism explores concepts of race, space and time in order to ask the existential question posed by critic Mark Dery: “Can a community whose past has been deliberately erased imagine possible futures?”

Will the alternative futures and realities Afrofuturism describes transform and reshape the concept of black identity? Join Future Tense for a discussion on Afrofuturism and its unique vantage on the challenges faced by black Americans and others throughout the African diaspora.

During the event, enjoy an Afrofuturist inspired drink from 67 Orange Street. Follow the discussion online using #Afrofuturism and by following @NewAmericaNYC and @FutureTenseNow.

Click here to RSVP. Space is limited so register now!

PARTICIPANTS

Michael Bennett
Principal Investigator, School for the Future of Innovation in Society, Arizona State University
@MGBennett

Ytasha Womack
Author, Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture and Post Black: How A New Generation is Redefining African American Identity
@ytashawomack

Juliana Huxtable
DJ and Artist
@HUXTABLEJULIANA

Walé Oyéjidé
Designer and Creative Director, Ikire Jones
@IkireJones

Aisha Harris
Staff writer, Slate
@craftingmystyle

It seems we have one word, Afrofuturism, and two definitions. One where Africa is referenced and one where African-American experience is referenced.

For anyone curious about Nesta, where Jessica Bland works and the Future Fest host (from its Wikipedia entry),

Nesta (formerly NESTA, National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) is an independent charity that works to increase the innovation capacity of the UK.

The organisation acts through a combination of practical programmes, investment, policy and research, and the formation of partnerships to promote innovation across a broad range of sectors.

That’s it for now.

Human enhancement, brains, and transhumanism: what does nano have to do with it?

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A Sept. 14, 2011 conversation on Slate.com about Extreme Human Enhancement started with this provocative title, Should We Use Nanotech, Genetics, Pharmaceuticals, and Augmentations To Go Above and Beyond Our Biology? The official discussants are Kyle Munkittrick, Brad Allenby, and Nicholas Agar. Here’s a little more about Kyle, Brad, and Nicholas, from page one of the the Slate discussion,

Nicholas Agar is an associate professor at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. He is the author, among other things, of Humanity’s End: Why We Should Reject Radical Enhancement (2010) and Liberal Eugenics: In Defense of Human Enhancement (2004).

Brad Allenby is the Lincoln professor of engineering and ethics; a professor of civil, environmental, and sustainable engineering; and the founding director of the Center for Earth Systems Engineering and Management at Arizona State University. He is co-author with Daniel Sarewitz of The Techno-Human Condition.

Kyle Munkittrick is a bioethicist and a program director at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology. He blogs at Pop Bioethics and Discover magazine’s Science Not Fiction. [Note: I have made some formatting changes.]

Nanotechnology and the other technologies are mentioned in passing, the focus of the discussion is ‘should we or shouldn’t we enhance ourselves’ along with some comments as to whether or not humans have a biological imperative to create and apply technology to the planet and to ourselves.

This Slate discussion is a way of publicizing a Future Tense event in Washington, DC being held today, Sept. 15, 2011.

This conversation is part of a Future Tense, a partnership between Slate, the New America Foundation, and Arizona State. On Thursday, Sept. 15, Future Tense will be hosting an event in Washington, D.C., on the boundaries between humans and machines, “Is Our Techno-Human Marriage in Need of Counseling?” [I removed the RSVP]

You can watch the livestreamed event here.

Coincidentally, Brain Gear is opening today. From the host’s (University of Groningen in The Netherlands) website page,

BRAIN GEAR, A conference in Groningen on September 15 and 16.
Neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, regulators and artists discuss the available and emerging technologies to repair and enhance the brain.

Professor Andy Miah, one of the invited speakers at Brain Gear, has made his presentation, Neurodevices for the Posthuman Mind,  available for viewing at Prezi.

I find all this quite exciting given my paper, Whose electric brain? about memristors, artificial synapses, and cognitive entanglement. I have currently raised $460 towards my presentation at ISEA 2011 (International Symposium Electronic Arts). Thank you to everyone who has given funds toward my dream at DreamBank.

Sick and tired of the ‘social media is changing how science is practiced’ narrative

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The whole ‘social media is changing ______’ puzzles me. You can fill in the blank with science/government/social relationships/etc. It’s always the same notion. Somehow social media is engendering changes the like of which we’ve never seen before.

  • The February 2011 overthrow of Mubarak in Egypt was all due to social media, as is the current social unrest in many Middle Eastern Countries.
  • Social relationships are being negatively impacted (nobody talks to anybody else anymore or it’s opening new avenues for relationships)
  • The practice of science is being changed by the use of social media.
  • etc.

Mostly I’m concerned with the one about science since I recently ended up on a panel where the discussion turned on this topic. I think there are a lot of things having an impact on how science is practiced and trying to establish the role social media is playing, if any, is a little premature.

We had Rosie Redfield on the panel. Rosie is a professor at the University of British Columbia who was part of the ‘arsenic life’ story that took the internet by a storm in late November/early December 2010. (Confession: I got caught up in the excitement in my Dec. 6, 2010 posting and recanted in my Dec. 8, 2010 posting.) Recently, there’s been a story about ‘arsenic life’ by Carl Zimmer for Slate magazine titled, How #arseniclife changed science. Here’s Zimmer’s set up (from the Slate article),

On November 29, NASA announced that it would soon hold a press conference to “discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.” Wild speculation ran amok—perhaps scientists had found living things on one of Saturn’s moons. At the press conference, the scientists did not unveil an actual extraterrestrial, but they did have big news. A new paper had just been published in the journal Science, they said, which described bacteria that seemed able to build their own DNA from arsenic. If that were true, it would be an historic discovery, because no such ability has ever been found among Earth’s life-forms.

The paper was published online in late November and attracted a great deal of discussion and criticism almost immediately on blogs (Rosie Redfield’s RRResearch amongst them) and on twitter via the hash tag topic, #arseniclife. The print version of the paper, along with critical letters, will appear in the June 3, 2011 issue of Science.

Here’s Zimmer’s take on what makes this particular scientific dust-up different,

For those of us who have been tracking #arseniclife since last Thanksgiving, however, today comes as an anticlimax. There’s not much in the letters to Science that we haven’t read before. In the past, scientists might have kept their thoughts to themselves, waiting for journals to decide when and how they could debate the merits of a study. But this time, they started talking right away, airing their criticisms on the Internet. In fact, the true significance of the aliens-that-weren’t will be how it helped change the way scientists do science.

Zimmer goes on to describe this new practice,

Redfield and her colleagues are starting to carry out a new way of doing science, known as post-publication peer review. Rather than leaving the evaluation of new studies to a few anonymous scientists, researchers now debate the merit of papers after they have been published. The collective decision they come to stays open to revision.

Post-publication peer review—and open science in general—is attracting a growing number of followers in the scientific community. But some critics have argued that it’s been more successful in theory than in practice. The #arseniclife affair is one of the first cases in which the scientific community openly vetted a high-profile paper, and influenced how the public at large thought about it.

Post-publication peer review existed before social media as per ‘cold fusion’ (Wikipedia essay). I remember it because I wasn’t particularly interested in science at the time but this was everywhere and it went on for months. There was the initial excitement and enthusiasm (the ‘cold fusion’ scientists were featured on the cover of Times or Newsweek or maybe both in the days when those magazines were powerhouse publications). Then, as the initial enthusiasm died down, the storm of scientific criticism started (those other scientists may not have had social media but they made themselves felt). The story took place over eight to 10 months and achieved public awareness in a way that scientists can only fantasize about these days.  By comparison, the arsenic story blew up and disappeared from public consciousness within roughly two weeks, if that.

Social media may yet change how science is practiced but I wouldn’t use Zimmer’s story about #arsencilife to support that belief, in fact, I think it could support another idea altogether.

The ‘arsenic’ story was, by comparison, with ‘cold fusion’ greatly truncated and most members of the public never really heard about it and, as a consequence, were not exposed to the furious debate and discussion as they were with  ‘cold fusion’.  They did not get exposed to how science ‘really works and therein lies a problem because they did not see the uncertainties, the mistakes, and revised ideas.

As for what factors may be having an impact on scientific practice, I’d suggest reading Identifying good scientists and keeping them honest on The Black Hole blog by David Kent. Here’s an excerpt,

In a February 2011 interview with Lab Times, Cambridge scientist Peter Lawrence1 reflects on his own career and complains that “the heart of research is sick” as he charts the changes in the way in which science is pursued.  Briefly, he cites impact factors and the increased need to assign metrics to scientists (# of publications, H-index, etc) as main drivers of producing low quality research and unfairly squeezing out some good scientists who do not publish simply for the sake of publishing.  Impact factor fever runs deep throughout laboratories but, most damagingly, exists at the funding agency and university administrative level as well.

ETA June 17, 2011: For anyone who’d like to read some updated and contrasting discussion about the #arseniclife aftermath for scientific practice and science education there are two June 16, 2011 guest posts for Scientific American, one from Rosie Redfield and the other from Marie-Claire Shanahan. Plus, if you are interested in more details about the cold fusion story and the role electronic communication played, check out Marie-Claire Shanahan’s post,  Arsenic, cold fusion and the legitimacy of online critique, on the Boundary Vision blog.

ASME’s introductory nanotechnology podcast doesn’t mention the word billionth

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It’s a landmark moment, I have never before come across an introductory nanotechnology presentation where they make no reference to ‘billionth’ as in, nanometre means one billionth of a metre.

The American Society of Mechanical Engineers now known as ASME offers a series of podcasts about nanotechnology on its website. This page is where you can sign up to get free access. (You might want to take a look at that agreement before submitting it. More about that later.) I saw the first installation on Andrew Maynard’s 2020 Science blog here. Andrew is prominently featured in this first podcast.

I enjoyed the podcast and found this new approach to introducing nanotechnology quite intriguing and I suspect they’re going in the right direction. 1 billionth of a metre or of a second doesn’t really convey that much information for most of us. Personally, I visualize the existence of alternate realities, tiny worlds of atoms and molecules which I believe to be present but are not perceptible to me through my senses.

It’s been decades since I first saw a representation of an atom or a molecule but the resemblance to planets has often played in my imagination since. They will always be planets for me, regardless of the fact that more accurate representations exist than the ones I saw so many years ago.

I think it’s the poetic aspect of it all, as if we carry worlds within us while our own planet may be simply an atom in someone else’s universe. One of these days when I have a better handle on what I’m trying to say here,  I will write a poem about it.

Actually, I’ve been meaning to do a series of poems based on the periodic table of elements ever since I saw a revisioning of the periodic table, The Chemical Galaxy by Philip Stewart. The desire was reawakened recently on finding Sam Kean’s series Blogging the Periodic Table, for Slate Magazine. From Kean’s first entry,

I’m blogging about the periodic table this month in conjunction with my new book, The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World From the Periodic Table of the Elements. Now, I know not everyone has fond memories of the periodic table, but it got to me early—thanks to one element, mercury. I used to break those old-fashioned mercury thermometers all the time as a kid (accidentally, I swear), and I was always fascinated to see the little balls of liquid metal rolling around on the floor. My mother used to sweep them up with a toothpick, and we kept a jar with a pecan-size glob of all the mercury from all the broken thermometers on a knickknack shelf in our house.

But what really reinforced my love of mercury—and got me interested in the periodic table as a whole—was learning about all the places that mercury popped up in history. Lewis and Clark hauled 600 mercury-laced laxative tablets with them when they explored the interior of America—historians have tracked down some places where they stayed based on deposits in the soil. The so-called mad hatters (like the one in Alice in Wonderland) went crazy because of the mercury in the vats in which they cleaned fur pelts.

Mercury made me see how many different areas of life the periodic table intersects with, and I wrote The Disappearing Spoon because I realized that you can say the same about every single element on the table. There are hidden tales about familiar elements like gold, carbon, and lead and even obscure elements like tellurium and molybdenum have wonderful, often wild back stories.

There are eight more entries as of 11:25 am PST, July 15, 2010. I wish Kean good luck as he sells his book. By the way, he’ll be blogging until early August 2010.

Getting back to ASME and their nanotechnology podcasts. I haven’t signed up and am not sure I will. They are insisting on copyright in their  user agreement (link to page),

Copyrights. All rights, including copyright and database right, in this Site and its contents (including, but not limited to, all text, images, software, video clips, audio clips) (collectively, “Content”), are owned by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), or otherwise used by ASME as permitted by applicable law or agreement.

…

Content Displayed on the Website. User shall not remove, obscure or alter the Content. User shall not distribute, rent, lease, transfer or otherwise make the Content available to any third party, or use the Content for systematic downloading, and/or the making of print or electronic copies for transmission to non-subscribers. User may download only the video clips designated on the Website as downloadable and may not share video URLs with non-subscribers. [emphases mine]

If I read those passages correctly, I’m prevented from copying any portion of the materials from their website and reproducing them on this blog to nonsubscribers. (I trust reproducing portions of their ‘user agreement’ won’t land me into trouble.) Since I copy and excerpt with a very high rate of frequency (being careful to give attribution and links while excerpting portions only), I don’t want to be placed in the position of having to ask for permission each and every time I’d like to copy something from the ASME site.  A lot of my entries are timely so I don’t want to wait and, frankly, I don’t understand what their problems with activities such as mine might be.  I suspect that this agreement will prove overly prohibitive and I hope the ASME folks will reconsider their approach to copyright. I really would like to view a few of their podcasts.