Personally, this was my favorite Praxis because it challenged my perception of the present and the future and allowed me to explore so many different facets of my imagination. Much of these sentiments stem from the focus on Afro-futurism, a concept I didn’t know about previously – I thought this was such a refreshing and progressive departure from how we frequently reframe and reclaim terms, sentiments, or artifacts from the dominator culture, immersing viewers into a rich, imaginative, sci-fi world where anything is possible. Through this project, I’ve realized that by opening up your imagination to explore without boundaries, the futures we begin to imagine, no matter how far-fetched, terrifying, or euphoric, will begin to permeate into social consciousness. Since those futures can take its form through sci-fi movies like Black Panther or graphic novels like Kindred, those ideas become much more accessible and entertaining to the general population, ultimately leading to a chain reaction for social change. 

For my three posts, I explored the topics of censorship, social equity and complacency, and the erasure of important narratives with my groups. For the first post, I worked with Abby, Megan, and Quan to create a creative piece on the dangers and extremes of a society ruled by government censorship and propaganda. This was my favorite post because we really pushed each other to explore the endless possibilities of multimedia. While I was writing the poem, I was inspired by my group’s discussion on how we can visually portray the suffocation of censorship through media, leading me to treat the poem as a drawing of sorts, crossing parts out and painting over it with a different set of words. Multimedia allowed us to visually expand our argument to create a more sensory experience by mixing text, images, and sound – the presentation of the poem to create a mental image, the drawings to solidify visually the loss of identity, and the sound in the video to appeal emotionally to viewers. 

For my second post, I worked with Kristin and Megan to explore the narrow line between utopia and dystopia. This began when my group members observed that in media pieces as well as nations that have attempted to create some version of utopia, it always seemed that one group’s happiness was created at another’s expense, so thus, perhaps utopia and dystopia come hand in hand, eternally connected to each other. Our following conversation explored this topic in ways that I had never thought of before, searching for supposed utopias in media and other societies that were not originally branded as utopias (i.e. communist China under Mao and Zootopia). We began to understand that utopias have never worked because those paradises operated under what the institution in power decided that utopia would look like. We dissected the complexities of human nature and why complacency would never work for long, as there always seemed to be one person or a group of people who start to question the social structure and rally for change. We chose to create a collage with annotations and a description with historical evidence to showcase our multi-layered conversation, with the hopes to open up our discussion to readers. As I was making the collage, I was acutely aware of how we wanted to layer annotations on it and how we wanted to create a smooth transition to the description – I wanted to keep in mind that it was the foundation for our text to build off, thus choosing symbolic images for each media example and positioning them around the image of the earth to connect it to our writings on how citizens in a utopia accept those unequal societies as their whole world, finding it difficult to break out of the cycle. 

For my third post, I worked with Quan, Abby, and Megan again to expand on our first post, this time choosing to explore the opposite side of the spectrum. We proposed that in a society where speech is not monitored at all, there would be a similar erasure of important narratives like with our censorship post, as those narratives may be drowned out by less important information fighting for the limelight within the information overload. People might even give up on telling their stories if hate is no longer monitored and if hate wins over love. We again chose to combine text and sound in a video to immerse viewers in a sensory overload experience, similar to our first post, except this time, overwhelming listeners with our POV-style video rather than stripping what they hear to the bare minimum. What I noticed while finding topics to record myself talking about for the video voice-over, was that if you Google “news”, not only is there a News tab, but automatically Google will filter results to the most relevant and significant current events, meaning we had to dig a little to find celebrity gossip columns, hate comments, and unimportant information. It makes me wonder, if we had no filters in a society, what information would rise to the top and stay relevant? What do we value as a society today and should we be concerned about the direction we are heading towards?

Throughout this entire process, I’ve started to change how I approach media and what sorts of messages I want to use media to express. Building this manifesto showed me that in the same way that we need to question the known and stitch together the unknown to find hidden histories, multimedia art uses the same principles – it draws from the traditional rules of certain media forms to create something different in order to emphasize the untouched or difficult parts of our societies. Through the ways my groups have chosen to construct and supplement our arguments with media, I’ve learned that sometimes, when the norms of one type of media cannot properly represent a topic or a sentiment, we must innovate and disrupt the dominant culture’s narrative to create something provoking and worthy of discussion. The future doesn’t write itself, rather it’s the people that can lead it in a certain direction, both good and bad. While I think about how I will continue to write my manifesto of resistance and resilience through my future work, I will keep reminding myself that there are no real boundaries to how or what I chose to argue, only the extent of my imagination.