Project 3, Manifesto of Future Resistance and Resilience

Individual or Group Media Interventions via Weekly Multimedia Posts

3 Multimedia Posts on Scalar with one reflection after post 3 (Reflection has an optional posting on Scalar or in Google Drive Folder) + citations.  Reflection is due with Post #3 at midnight on Friday 13^th

Each Post is worth 30 points, Reflection is worth 10 points.

Every song I write tells a story. A story that humanity needs to know about. In my music I speak of unknown things, impossible things, ancient things, potential things. No two songs tell the same story. They say that history only repeats itself, but history is only his story. You haven’t heard my story yet. My story is different from his story; my story is not part of his story. Because his/story repeats itself, but my story is endless. It never repeats itself; why should it?  A sunset does not repeat itself, neither does sunrise…. Sun Ra, A Joyful Noise

For Praxis 3, we will create a series of multi-media posts or interventions that will serve as a Manifesto for Resistance and Resilience in our Museum. We hope with our manifesto to explore the endless possibilities for our future. For these “impossible things” we take as inspiration Afrofuturism’s core philosophy that the future:

1. 1) does not exist in isolation but in conversation with the present and past
2. 2) should not erase or assume a world of post-difference.  That is, ours is not a culture that exists beyond race, ethnicity, class, and gender differences, but rather critiques harmful distinctions or separations and imagines the need for an inclusive space that embraces differences with an ethic of love.

Each week we ask you to review a set of materials and to pose a set of questions. Our class will then reflect on these questions in small group discussions.  At the end of the discussion each class you will be asked to begin a post on a multimedia entry in our Manifesto for the Future. You can write individually or collectively and use any tools you would like as long as the output is a “multimedia” post that you post OR create in Scalar.  You can do a set of annotations on media. You can write text (short essay, story, or poem) with a media image/illustration/collage. You can make a video. Or you can mix any combination of media for your entry in the manifesto.

You should create a post that disrupts his/story and serves as an entry in our Manifesto of Future Resistance and Resilience.  We want to disrupt a story that only goes in the same repetitive direction toward the marginalization and erasure of difference. We want to show there are choices, options, possibilities for change. Your post/entry/story can be explicitly intersectional or focused specifically on issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and class.

Each media post can be shaped as utopia, dystopia or neither, but should reveal that there is another way to imagine difference beyond exclusion or erasure. You might begin by reflecting on your own or discussing with a team – what does change look like (in an equitable future)? This change should consider hooks’s “love ethic” as a site of transformation and healing and Lorde’s understanding that the acknowledgment of difference has “…the power to seek new ways of being in the world.”  Your post can be as policy driven (e.g., a world without guns) or philosophical (e.g. what does democracy look like?) or materialist (ending pay equity disparities).

Your post should be historically informed but need not be written as a chronology, news account, or historical sci-fi. You are free to work in whatever time in the future (near or far or time travel) and sub-genre within sci fi (detective, superhero, history, etc).  Like any good project/post, you need to uncover, discover, what are the conditions that produced the issue under investigation, and what needs to change or remain the same to achieve equity?

To get started on this, you need to work with your colleagues to discuss and develop:

1. a) Idea/Problem/Solution (what does change look like for x?)
2. b) Storyworld  (time/place)
3. c) Structure & Design (what form will your post take)

You will be graded on:

Concept: Does your post explore a problem/issue on social equity and difference, in a creative and critical fashion? How well did you or your team formulate the problem in light of historical, cultural, or social factors? How well did the selection of the post’s space/time help to advance or reveal the issues at stake?

Technique:  Did you demonstrate core competency of selection and configuration of materials in your multi-media post? Did you make the most of the opportunity to use media (audio, sound, image, video, text) in your project?

Complexity: Does your project show complexity with regard to creative or critical possibilities? Do you show perspectives, interesting choices, or “endless possibilities” for our future?

Reflection/Citations (please note each person writes an individual reflection and also includes citations for all materials used).

You will post your multimedia posts on a page or pages in Scalar under Praxis 3, Week 1, 2, and 3.

At the end of the 3 post process everyone writes an individual reflection. Your reflection should demonstrate awareness about the key issues in the course (e.g., social/racial justice, the complexities of identity and differences, multimedia interventions, visible and hidden histories, Afro-futurism). You might also consider questions such as: How did building a collective manifesto change the way you thought about media making?  How do “imagined futures” such as Afro-futurism help in creating social change?  How does multimedia help you enhance or expand your argument and/or story|world? How did the process of collaboration work in regard to imagining possibilities for your posts?  Did the group generate ideas you had not thought of?  How do you think that engaging with our Manifesto of Future Resistance and Resilience might affect users in terms of:  a) awareness b) dialogue c) social change d) imagined futures?