I was a little shocked this morning when I was checking emails and upcoming events and realized that I was in the future.
The new black is now.
If the “Attending” numbers on Facebook events are accurate, then tomorrow night the African American Arts and Cultural Center in San Francisco will be overrun with approximately 300 black/afro/futurist/punk/geeks and the people who roll with them. The opening of Black Diamonds Shining’s “The Black Futurists” exhibit and accompanying two month schedule of events, performances and film screenings sound like a love song that’ll lure in all sectors of the Bay’s black outlier culture. The ones usually only glimpsed on the deepest house dance floors, select street art installations and the most underground art events.
A couple weeks after that, the much YouTubed TED conference is getting the Black to the Future treatment, when Berlin based Afrofuturistsaxtechologist Onyx Ashanti takes the stage to show off the latest evolution of his Beat Jazz project-an open source, woodwind mimicking, motion sensitive, MIDI music system.
In September, South Africa will see the 4th installment of the annual Pan African Space Station, a 30 day music and arts festival and “cross-cultural and cyber-spatial exploration, bringing together diverse pan-African sounds from ancient techno to future roots.” The event features everything from musical tributes to Steve Biko and Busi Mhlongo to performances by Doctor Philip Tabane & Malombo and Theo Parish.
And in true “seen it like a Zenith” steez, Black Rock evangelist, cultural curator and community catalyst Rob Fields recently announced that on October 17th he’s hosting theFestival of the New Black Imagination in, where else but the black planet of Brooklyn. The Festival sounds like a place where all the corners of black creativity can converge and add ingredients to the next serving of cultural cosmic slop.
If you’re looking for the next “It”, it’s here. If you’re looking for African diaspora folks who’re on something different, you really, really don’t have to look too hard. The forward thinking, tech savvy, community building tribes mainstream culture has been “searching” for-those “positive”, nuanced portraits of black folks-are being created in hyper real, augmented reality.
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