Join us for Black Metal Starship Program at Onassis ONX by Afrotectopia on Friday, November 1st!

WHAT: BLACK METAL STARSHIP PROGRAM WHEN: Friday, November 1st, 6PM-8PM WHERE: Onassis ONX - 645 5th Avenue, Lower Level, New York, NY 10022

"More than just a book, Black Metal is a cultural heirloom—a testament to the power of Black creativity and imagination." - New York Said

Onassis ONX is hosting Black Metal Starship Program by Afrotectopia at 6PM on Friday, November 1. Black Metal Starship Program is designed to simulate the Black Metal Experience through immersive cinema. Black Metal is a new protocol for space travel. Simultaneously, it is a tool for navigating the inner self. Its pages explore speculative plants in outer space, a space suit that comprehensively links with mind, body, and spirit, a novel cinematic excerpt of a Black Metal experience, and a workbook teaching a robust process on cultivating your best self. The Black Metal Starship Program brings the book to life through a cinematic simulation of the voyage, inviting the audience to pay closer attention to the world around and within them.

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ABOUT THE BOOK: Black Metal is a special limited edition (500 copies), intricately designed, kitchen table art book. Black Metal pushes the boundaries of space travel, science fiction, speculative design, Black culture, art, technology, and spirituality. Uniquely positioned at the nexus of such fields, it paves the way for a new field of its own - planting seeds for boundless imagination, and inviting its audience to simultaneously experience their internal and external worlds, anew. ‍Black Metal is simultaneously an archive and catalyst of future worlds.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS: While the book is a collaboration amongst 4 artists, Ari will be the host of this event.

Jordan Caldwell is a projector blending art, language and technology within community. Her practice materializes as new media exhibitions and cooperative spaces for interdisciplinary studies. Her current focus is cultivating residency programs in land-oriented locations, while centering intrapersonal growth as essential to creative development.

Jeremy Kamal is an artist combining film, video games, music, and landscape architecture into a single expanded fictional universe. Using contemporary media, such as computer-generated animation and video games, Kamal creates digital sci-fi environments that challenge traditional ideas of culture and ecology. His work features a growing cast of interconnected landscapes that host atmospheric imagery, emotive characters, and unique narratives that frontier new geomythologies. Jeremy is an Onassis ONX fellow and was previously an artist resident at the Sundance Institute, NYU ITP, Folly Tree Arboretum, and AFROTECTOPIA. As a freelance 3D generalist, he has collaborated on projects for Marine Serre, The North Face, Gucci, Trippie Redd, Yo Gotti, Sa Babi, and Lil Miquela. He is a design faculty at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and holds a Master of Landscape Architecture from Harvard GSD and a Master of Arts from SCI-Arc’s Fiction and Entertainment program.

Kordae (Tafa) Jatafa Henry is a filmmaker and a visual artist practicing ruminates in the invisible, lost, invented, forgotten, coded, and bounded layers of who we are into new worlds. His most recent work explores the ontological themes of raw materials, mysticism, landscapes, movement performance, race, gender and emergent technologies through the power of ceremony and ritual. As a non-binary approach, Kordae’s work reconstructs past, present, and future narratives driven by pop-culture, and Black speculative fiction. Where flesh meets animation, performance meets the virtual, Kordae’s work instills a techno-ontological study of Blackness in the 21st century. This re-imagining of cinema is an emergence of a new ideology for storytelling that refuses to sit still. His CGI works evoke an embodied viscerality that Pixar has yet to exhibit into motion pictures. Stemming from his own Jamaican-British roots he finds himself returning to artforms such as movement, mythology, and folklore but in the digital, that utilizes intonation and music to deliver rhythmic accentuation and dramatic stylization of worlds that feel. Through live-action music films, installations, dance, anthropomorphization, game engine environments, and mythology, Kordae’s work invites new ways of seeing humans, folklore, mysticism, pop-culture, post-genre music, labor, and creation stories as tools to explore the radical imagination. Currently, Kordae is directing music films, teaching at SCI-Arc and a fellow at NEW INC/ONX. Within his fellowship he is working on a coming of age intersteller short film entitled IF NOT NOW about how a civilizations began.

Ari Melenciano has cultivated an expansive practice within the arts, technology, design, culture, and pedagogy. Her natural ability to combine many disciplines reveals their interconnectedness and reimagines their conventions for new possibilities. Her art practice ranges from using AI through both critical and imaginative lenses, to sound design using botanical data. Her work has been exhibited around the world from Dubai's Museum of the Future to the Studio Museum in Harlem. She's a frequent international public speaker, and occasionally designs and teaches courses at New York University, Hunter College, Parsons, and the Pratt Institute. She's the founder of Afrotectopia, a social institution that imagines new possibilities at the nexus of art, design, technology, activism, and culture. Afrotectopia has taken many forms, from festivals, to think tanks, summer camp, adult continued education programming, international residency, and incubator. And previously, she was a creative technologist at Google's Creative Lab. Some work she did while at Google included creating technologies using machine learning on hardware devices the size of a finger, contributing creative direction for the Google for Africa campaign, and creative strategy for generative AI development.

ABOUT PARTICIPATING ORGANIZATIONS & INSTITUTIONS: Afrotectopia is a social institution cultivating boundless innovation at the nexus of art, design, technology, and culture. Founded in 2018 by NYU ITP graduate student, Ari Melenciano, Afrotectopia began as a highly cross-disciplinary conference cultivating a vibrant community of industry and cultural pioneers. For years, Afrotectopia hosted a variety of free and low-cost programming that bridged connections between emerging technologies, Black culture, and racial equity. In 2021, Afrotectopia partnered with MIT Media Lab's Space Exploration Initiative and New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program to create an incubator that reimagines space travel, additionally supported by the Ford Foundation. The product of the incubator is an expansive and highly limited edition art book titled, Black Metal. To celebrate the launch of the book, Afrotectopia is inviting communities around the globe to co-imagine this world through an immersive book tour, Black Metal Starship Program.

Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) is a 2 year long graduate program within New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. ITP is sometimes described as an art school for engineers and at the same time an engineering school for artists. ITP is often considered a Center for the Recently Possible.

MIT Media Lab’s Space Exploration Initiative is an expansive and highly collaborative research team. With society at the cusp of interplanetary civilization, the MIT Space Exploration Initiative takes a unique approach to humanity’s horizons. SEI is invested in building, testing and flying the technologies and tools of exploration that will empower Earth citizens for this new phase of our collective existence.

The Ford Foundation is a non-profit organization invested in building a world where everyone has the power to shape their lives.