"Music is a plane of wisdom"—Transmissions from the Offworlds of Afrofuturism

Authors

  • tobias c. van Veen McGill University

Keywords:

Afrofuturism, Sun Ra, Detroit techno, acid house, jungle, prog-rock, grime, dubstep, dub, jazz, disco, MCs, Janelle Monáe, Jeff Mills, David Byrne, hauntology, ethnoforgery, exile, alien, abduction, dehumanization, black identity, posthuman, android

Author Biography

tobias c. van Veen, McGill University

tobias c. van Veen, b. 1978, is a renegade theorist and turntablist, practitioner of the technology arts, and doctoral candidate in Philosophy & Communication Studies at McGill University. Since 1993 he has disseminated and exhibited work in sound, radio & net-art, working with STEIM, the New Forms Festival, the Banff Centre, Eyebeam, VIVO, MUTEK, MDCN.ca, the Vancouver New Music Society and Hexagram. His writing on philosophy of technology, AfroFuturism & technoculture has been disseminated worldwide, appearing in CTheory, EBR, Bad Subjects, Leonardo, Locus Suspectus, FUSE, e/i, WIRE, HorizonZero, Dancecult and through Autonomedia, among others. His sound & net.art has been disseminated through Rhizome.org, Javamuseum.org, Kunstradio, BURN.fm, CiTR, Juniradio.net and Alt-X, with sonic and mix releases on No Type's BricoLodge and the and/OAR labels. From 1993-2000 he was Direktor of the sonic performance Collective [shrumtribe.com] in Vancouver. From 2002-2007 he was Director of UpgradeMTL [upgrademtl.org] and Concept Engineer at the Society for Arts and Technology [SAT.qc.ca]. He is co-founder of technoWest.org with DJ Dub Gnostic, controltochaos.ca with DJ FISHEAD, tri.phonic with Daniel Gardner and VJ Johnny Ranger, and thisistheonlyart.com with artist ssiess. His last exhibition, 'espaceSONO :: audio.lab', presented 36 global sound-artists in a uniquely constructed listening environment at the SAT[GALERIE] in Fall 2007 [upgrademtl.org]. His next publication, an edited volume tentatively titled  _Afrofuturism: Interstellar Transmissions from Remix Culture_, is forthcoming from Wayne State UP in 2011. He also mixes a mean absynthe martini. His research blog can be found at [fugitive.quadrantcrossing.org].

Downloads

Published

24-Oct-2013

Issue

Vol 5, No 2 (2013): Special Issue on Afrofuturism

Section

Editorial

License

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
  1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
  2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g. post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal. Such derivate works or subsequent publications must happen no less than one calendar year after the initial publication date in Dancecult.
  3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g. in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).