AfroFutures_UK is a weekend event celebrating the intersection of futurism and the black experience. Featuring artists, academics, and activists, they aim to promote Afrofuturistic endeavours in the arts and technology. Metropolarity's own Rasheedah Phillips, founder of the AfroFuturist Affair and Black Quantum Futurism collective, will be there as a guest speaker.
The avant-garde is black! Afrofuturism is a cultural movement that has been existing for a couple of decades in America, Europe and Africa. Some prominent Afrofuturists are Sun Ra, George Clinton, Jeff Mills and Science Fiction writer Octavia Butler. Today, there's a new wave of Afrofuturist writers, performers, visual artists, musicians, filmmakers, designers, bloggers, activists. Contemporary Afrofuturists - Rasheedah Phillips, Ytasha Womack, King Britt and many others - fuse science fiction imagination with avant-garde & DIY culture while reflecting black diaspora.
From 14th to 17th October, WORM will celebrate contemporary Afrofuturism with the festival "Afrofuturism Now!". In preparation of this event, our program will look back at the roots of this super-interesting cultural movement, with an extensive film program and a lecture in June.
THAT'S RIGHT WE'RE DOING THE DAMN THING ONCE AGAIN
IF YOU ARE A TRANS AND/OR QUEER PHILLY CAT AND WRITE/MAKE SOME KIND OF PERFORMABLE SPECULATIVE FICTION THAT YOU WANT TO SHARE WITH A ROOM PACKED FULL OF YOUR ILK, DROP US A LINE AT METROPOLARITY@GMAIL.COM
Slought is pleased to announce "Future Perfect," a screening and workshop exploring future imaginaries from the New Right to the AfroFuturist Affair, on Tuesday, November 3, 2015 from 6-8pm. The event will feature the Philadelphia premiere of Daniel Tucker's feature-length video essay Future Perfect: Time Capsules in Reagan Country (54 minutes, 2015), followed by a dialogue between the artist and author Rasheedah Phillips, creator of The AfroFuturist Affair, exploring the liberatory potential of language, and the relationship of writing to social justice and alternative conceptions of the future.
Ras, Eighteen, maybe Alex too, will be on hand at this week's Comma Talk: Curated & hosted by Maryan Captan, comma talk is a discussion-based and audience interactive reading series featuring Philadelphia's emerging writers and poets. With a goal of exploring and discussing creative process, themes, and techniques used in the featured writers' work, Comma […]
**what is this is**
**queer sci-fi reading**
OUR CHURCH
The LASER LIFE series of readings is designed to expose the quantumly quantative, psycho-spiritual, panoramic truth of the speculative, to make real the shaman's holler, the mystic's clamour, the soothsayer's griot-speak-- all that was falsely remembered as unreal. Laser Life is a tour beyond the stilted cis-hetero-white-male gaze of normative “science fiction” that plagues the shelves of your local bookstore and Goodreads “to read” lists. It is hoped that Laser Life does not serve as tokenistic or anomalous within the ranks of science fiction, but that the inclusion of our marginalized voices be viewed as not only empowering, necessary or revolutionary, but as intrinsic.
Laser Life is everything, and everything in its place: the nook of all that is possible for us to view: the whole of the universe.
Join Metropolarity, APIARY Magazine, and the Free Library of Philadelphia for an afternoon of writers’ workshops and readings. This year, Metropolarity and APIARY Magazine have joined forces to produce a sci-fi themed issue exploring the nature of vulnerability in our present realities of mass incarceration, mass surveillance, social media, and the potential for revolution. This event is part of the Free Library of Philadelphia's local iteration of the national 7 Days of Genius Festival #thatsgenius
11:00 A.M. – 1:00 P.M. One-on-one writers’ coaching with Apiary Magazine. Bring your own writing, and you’ll receive feedback. First come first served. (Grand Lobby)
1:00 P.M. – 3:00 P.M. SOFT TARGETS: Science Fiction as memoir in a reality of apocalypse. A workshop with the writers from Metropolarity about living under capitalism/militarism and using that as inspiration for writing (Room 108).
3:30 P.M. – 5:00 P.M. Reading and Q & A with Metropolarity and friends (Montgomery Auditorium).
@afrofuturistaffair // @blackquantumfuturism present the Space-Time Collapse Tour dates for April 2016 - readings, lectures, and panels on temporality, quantum futurism, speculation, displacement, future visioning, #diytimetravel at @universityoftoronto @penndesign @mocada_museum @ardentheatreco @thewoodenshoebooks @stocktonuniversity #afrofuturism #blackquantumfuturism #blackwomenwriters
Sirius JuJu
David Xu Borgonjon
Rasheedah Phillips
Laboria Cuboniks
Anthony Monteiro
PANEL/QnA
from the SOTHIS platform for the advancement of intelligent life-forms:
Present (noun) "this period of time, not the past or the future; now"
Re- (prefix) "used with the meaning “again” or “again and again” to indicate repetition, or with the meaning “back” or “backward” to indicate withdrawal or backward motion"
Present (verb) "to give, show, provide, or make known"
-Ing (suffix) "Art is not a be-ing, but a Being, the simple noun. It is not the verb, but its product." -Leroi Jones
$5-20 no one turned away
COMMUNITY POTLUCK & OPEN ACCESS SOCIAL CRITICISM OPEN MIC NIGHT DETAILS TBA THE LAST ONE: Metropolarity presents a night of community building and sharing. We seek social criticism from the community--performance art, blog rants, monologues, critical sci-fi, thesis excerpts, protest songs--whatever. As long as it explores and dissects the world we live in today. We […]
We have the tea
We have the lemonade
We shall serve
(soon we will bring it to the *real* Paris and watch IT burn)
Sofistifunk meets Chrome City! FLY LIFE!
AURA! JOHN MORRISON! ALEX! DUIJI 13! ICON EBONY FIERCE! We here ya'll!!
**this is an lgbtq function. no misogyny or homophobia tolerated, queer love and expression celebrated**
PHILADELPHIA THIS FRIDAY
Trans Women of Color Collective's ASCENSION
A concert in the park, celebrating Black trans and gender nonconforming artists in conjunction with the 2016 Philadelphia Trans Health Conference.
Curated by Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi and co-hosted by Cyree Jarelle Johnson (ACG '13), Ascension features Lucas Charlie Rose, Venus Selenite, Sidney Chase, Marco Munroe, Jordan Hope Miller, Nila Nokizaru, and Kavi Ade.
This is an outdoor, free event. No RSVP required. Friday, June 10 6:00 pm-8:00 pm at Thomas Paine Plaza (1401 John F. Kennedy Boulevard).
http://www.twocc.us/