Learning Outcomes
- Learn how connecting to our ancestry might provide design frameworks for belonging and being we can encoded into our dreams of tomorrow’s technologies.
- Learn how to leverage the possibilities of speculative design frameworks to imagine worlds with decolonial approaches to Dweb.
- Learn how to mine our ancestry to speculate Dweb futures in collaboration with ecosystems and bodies as interfaces instead of computers and hardware as we know it.
- Learn how to synthesize Dweb critiques with Dweb possibilities to inspire agency, generative conversations and possible DWeb adoption in our communities.
Materials Needed
A computer or device with Zoom installed, with camera and microphone.
Prerequisites
Recommended Pre-work: Interview family members to learn more about your ancestry. We will tap into our ancestral spirit and lineage as seed data for our speculative worlds.
Session Description:
We know this place as the North Carolina Black River, they know it as Cykofa. A parallel universe suspended among past and future — where cornrows are cryptography keys, data farms are data forests, the weaving loom is a computer, a cloth is a document, and chain link fencing from demolished prisons are used as architectural membrane woven with plant life. In Cykofa the trees have learned to communicate using the data Cykofians have encoded in the tree’s DNA and tree ring memory.
Cykofa is a speculative world Ayana has built inspired by the biotechnology research of Grow Your Own Cloud, abolitionist imaginaries and decolonial aesthetics. Synthesizing the concepts learned over this series of Dweb sessions she will invite you to leverage the power of worldbuilding to imagine, speculate and design a parallel universe suspended between the past and the future where decentralization is an ancient reality. We will explore expansive modes of decentralization that might have nothing to do with hardware or computer interfaces as we know them. Now that we know the critiques and the possibilities of Dweb, what world do we want to build in response? This praxis session will help us remember another one is possible…
