How does a black artist offer healing and power to the victims of anti-black violence? For Jameel Paulin, a survivor of a violent police encounter, the answer is found in Afrofuturism. For Jameel, Afrofuturism is a radically alternative visual language than the dominant language of the American police state. By making African descendants the center of his world view, Jameel uses Afrofuturism as a practice of radical self-love; a way of life that affirms his blackness and Africanness from the inside-out. He uses this perspective to create Afrofuturist virtual reality influenced by hip-hop production techniques. My work is primarily about transformations: new worlds, new relations, and new forms of being. It is about how descendants of the African diaspora have transformed the very grounds of being, meaning and relatedness through the framework of afrofuturism. As a visual artist who grew up during the overlapping eras of ‘golden age of hip-hop’ and the digital age, my experience of afrofuturism has primarily been shaped by the evolution of personal digital/information technology and hip-hop music. I use the emergent technology of virtual reality to create immersive audio-visual worlds influenced by afrofuturist themes and West African symbolism. By embracing the digital media, and creating digitally immersive realities, that are visually akin to the sonic environments of Coltrane, J Dilla, and Flying Lotus, I aim to situate hip-hop aesthetics within a tradition of black liberation aesthetics and to employ a kind of “hip-hop” method within my own creative practice. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

source