Submitter: Elizabeth J Chin, ArtCenter College of Design, chin.elizabethj@gmail.com
Abstract:
The Museum of AfroFuturities is a day-long speculative installation that reimagines the Hall of African Peoples at the American Museum of Natural History. Since it was first opened in 1968, this ethnographic display has gone largely unchanged. The installation proposed here aims to reconfigure this state of extended immobility by migrating the hall into alternative media. Working prototypes open revision moments for visitors to experience and range from material interventions to ar/vr overlays.“Stolen Pasts//Imagined Futures” covers select cases with lenticular blinds so that objects obtained through colonial violence cannot be viewed, instead offering glimpses of ghostly objects and possible futures, imagined by Africans themselves. In “Afrotopia” museum-goers experience the hall through the lens of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower; a workshop and facilitated AR interactions shift static dioramas into lively Afrofuture worlds. “Manifest Multiplicity” allows visitors to move through the hall against the curatorial grain. Three AR journeys trace different paths through African Medical Practice, Collection as Colonization, and Controversial Objects. Individual paths intersect at key moments to expose and confront complex histories. “Black Radical AI Voices” narrate curated audio tours. These AI voices are not reproductions of any single voice, but bespoke AI instances trained on combinations of such voices as Paul Robeson, Angela Davis, and Patrice Lumumba. Together the included projects propose ways to recuperate colonialist structures of knowledge residing in natural history museums, reconfiguring technologies often used for surveillance or extraction as vehicles for decolonization and abundance.
Areas of STS Scholarship: Forms and practices of expertise, Race/Black studies and STS, Decolonial and Postcolonial STS
Authors/Participants: Elizabeth J Chin, ArtCenter College of Design
Temi Odumosu, University of Washington
Elise Co, ArtCenter College of Design
