UPCOMING
Friday, January 24
6:30 – 9:00 pm
The LP Storefront
1476 Fulton Street
Black Metal Starship Program | Film Screening and Design Hackathon
Hosted by Ari Melenciano
Jump aboard for the Black Metal Starship Program (BMSP)! Come through for a special screening of Black Metal, a film adaptation of Afrotectopia’s recently published art book, and a design hackathon!
Founded by Ari Melenciano, Afrotectopia has grown from an NYC-based festival and conference to an international fellowship, catalyzing imagination across the Black and Pan-African diaspora. Black Metal is an intricately designed kitchen table art book produced by Afrotectopia that pushes the boundaries of space travel, science fiction, speculative design, Black culture, art, technology, and spirituality.
Participants are invited to the BMSP, an interactive program that brings the Black Metal life through an immersive cinematic experience and discussion. After the screening and discussion, travelers are invited to participate in a design hackathon to collectively imagine the future of space travel.
Refreshments will be provided.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
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.