I spent a little over ten years leading a kind of personal & collective creative network called The Young Never Sleep.
The studio and the people I’ve been able to connect with and create through it have shaped so much of who I am becoming.
Let this be a testament to the beauty of life, which we should all cherish with a deep gratitude for the Earth
The only home we’ve ever known.
Thanks to every single person who has made this world so wonderful for me.
Most of all, this is for you.
I’m constantly trying to find the best way to tell this story, to honor the many individuals who contributed to this journey.
Just like you, I’m continuously evolving.
Indian author and political activist Arundhati Roy
The roots of my fascination with other worlds began in childhood. Not only the worlds I imagined while alone in my room or with friends in backyards, game screens and playgrounds but the worlds that emerged within the inner dimensions of Black life.
(See: Black History, Genders, Psychology, Sociology, Male Culture, The Economics of Juice & American Mythologies: The Construction of Black Ientity)
I was born in Cleveland, Ohio on April 2nd, 1986 at I think about 4am?
Delivered by c-section at University Hospital. The rest, as I’m sure you can imagine... well, it’s a long story.
Anyone who knows me, knows that I don’t have quite the sharpest memory. Maybe it’s because I’m trying to do too many things at once, or because I have too many passwords to keep up with, but it’s probably something simple like not getting enough sleep lol. Some of the memories that do stay with me though, are thsoe that come from my childhood. Specifically, those first few questions I asked, that seemed to stick with me through my adolescence on into adulthood. Why was the sky blue? How did we get here? What’s in space? Why weren’t there any dinosaurs in the Bible? It’s this deep rooted, inherent curiousity, instilled and nurtured in me through my childhood, by my mother, my teachers, relatives and peers alike, that has been the underlying theme of this practice since it’s inception in 2010. It’s also that childlike curiousty, the simple questions that lead to more tantilizing questions with every deeply nourishing answer, the fractal nature of why, from which the studio owes it’s namesake. The more I asked and explored colletively through the studio practice, the more I became enchanted by the ingenuity of humanity, and even more humbled and overwhelmed by the creativity of nature. In spite of legacies of oppression, disenfranchisement, systems of violence that through generations sought to encage me and those like me, it’s my love for understanding through science, art and nature that kept me grounded to my core self. Through natures reflections, and the peoople I have been so fortunate to create with, I saw an open window to infinite possibility, a vision of another world.
The roots of my fascination with other worlds began in childhood. Not only the worlds I imagined while alone in my room or with friends in backyards, game screens and playgrounds but the worlds that emerged within the inner dimensions of Black life. This foundation, set into motion eons ago through countless human and non-human ancestors, brought into being by my mother and father and nurtured through the years by countless family members, friends, peers, mentors and colleagues.
The phrase “Another World is Possible” is one I began using as an underlying philosophy of my creative practice, The Young Never Sleep.
Diary
Hi, I’m Branden. Today is Saturday, March 15, 2025 9:48 PM and I am still alive.
Things about being Black #4683958673
Sometimes you just think about Sandra Bland.
Hi, I’m Branden. Today is Saturday, March 15, 2025 9:05 PM and I am still alive.
***Time can’t erase information.
Hi, I’m Branden. Today is Wednesday, March 12, 2025 6:69 PM and I am still alive.
Reminds me of my aunt
Hi, I’m Branden. Today is Friday, March 7, 2025 12:27 PM and I am still alive.
Spending some time using YOO to continue to flesh out this idea I’ve had for a long time called Self-synth. It’s a continuation of ideas I’ve explored over the years through my work about evolution, identity, conceptualizations of self, the influence of the internal and external environment on individual and collective development and so on...
As someone who is queer and doesn’t identify concretely with my assigned (male) gender idenity or the physical form I happen to inhabit in this lifetime, the idea of transition/transformation of self has been central to my practice. I many people who don’t have this experience, probably can’t relate to the significance of how much effort and energy it demans from folks who do, to show up day to day consistently in a way that aligns with some sense of your “true” self, beyond the confines of your own body and the many many social constructs that modern life requires of us. Being percieved is actually very exhausting! lol. And the types of gender/identity confirming routines, care and prodcedures that one could perform demand a considerable amount more in terms of energy, commitment and finances. I admire and highly respect those members of my Trans family who do take on the complex and sometimes arduous task of self-affirming body modification. It’s an immensely courageous thing to do, especially in light of the constant attacks against anyone who doesn’t fit the violently normailized social schema. This is why, as with much of my work, I take a concept like Self-Synth seriously as a dimension of my research & worldbuidling by grounding it in concrete research and practically implementable, currently available (albeit not very accessible) technologies. It’s important to me that the things I concieve of are actually possible.
One of the many things that became excited while expanding on Technoculture through my research in information, was the realization that many of the explorations of self-transformation that humans have always engaged in, from the costumed ceremonies of ancient cultures, to contemporary queer culture, could someday soon be realized through advanced technologies like bioengineering, AI and programmable materials. When thinking about the application of these technologies as they converged, I thought about the real potential of something like Self-Synth, a technology that would allow the user to change their physiology and even aspects of their biological makeup as easily as adjusting the bass or treble in an audio system. It made sense to me that this kind of technology would, at it’s foundation, be based on one’s self model, something that not only deals with present conceptualization of self, but requires the full unfolding of one’s human and non-human ancestry. The full history of events that makes us who we are, stretching to the very beginning of the Universe’s inception. This seed, this foundational model for a new self would also require a new universe within which to evolve. A universe with parameters adjusted to allow for a more full range of human expression, uninhibited by contemporary socioeconomic & cultural constraints.
Hi, I’m Branden. Today is Thursday, March 6, 2025 7:29 PM and I am still alive.
Started reading Life As No One Knows It by Sara Imari Walker. It’s crazy how aligned in our thinking we are. Same language, even a lot of the same references. Her thinking is really reaffirming.
Ellex sent me this crazy record. yes.
Hi, I’m Branden. Today is Wednesday, March 5, 2025 9:45 PM and I am still alive.
I’m currently working with Pitch Studios to apply for the Spaceship Earth Open Call 2025
Welcome to Spaceship Earth
Spaceship Earth tells the story of the future of evolution of humans on planet earth. After all, humanity is the unlikely result of 4 billion years of evolution on this planet; from self-replicating molecules in Archean seas, to eyeless fish in the Cambrian deep, to mammals scurrying from dinosaurs in the dark, and then, finally, improbably, ourselves. But we are not the end of this story, as evolution goes on.
Spaceship Earth explores the next evolutionary stages of planet earth. Launching in the Next Nature Museum, the building resembles a spaceship; yet we acknowledge planet earth as our mothership. Therefore we inhabit the building as a facility in which we train all humans to work together as a harmonious crew for the future generations to come. Spaceship Earth exists over four concentric rings that form circular balconies inside of the Next Nature Museum. Each ring carries artistic projects that invite the audience to discover, unfold and engage with the next stages of evolution:
Stage 1: Geosphere
Where did we come from? How did the earth originate? The first ring narrates the origin of the universe (13 billion years ago) and earth (4.5 billion ago). Here we learn about the big bang, the formation of quarks, atoms and molecules. It is the foundation of everything. It is the ground on which our futures are built. What will we leave behind?
Stage 2: Biosphere
What is life? How did it evolve on top of the geosphere? The second ring tells the story of the origin of life. From the very first cell to the creation of vertebrates. It’s an evolutionary tale that you might find in a natural history museum—instead of a technology museum—but understanding the impact of technology is indispensable knowledge. How will life evolve from here?
Stage 3: Technosphere
What is technology? How is it changing life? The third ring brings to light the transformative impact of technology on our planet. Technology is more than the latest smartphone or computer and is currently estimated to weigh over 30 trillion tons. Technology is an evolutionary force, it is our next nature. What will become of humans as we evolve under the selective pressures of technology?
Stage 4: Mindsphere
What does this all mean for your personal life as a human on this planet? Will we live with artificial intelligences? Is there a planetary consciousness emerging? How to navigate this world as a human being? The fourth ring discloses the most psychologically deepening stage of evolution. A personal journey inwards, where the audience will find their role and meaning as a member of Spaceship Earth.Seems super fitting, since we already have our own spaceship earth under construction :)
The stage we chose to focus on is the Mindsphere. Here is a working copy of my response so far:
Spaceship Earth Overview Questions
linkStage 4: MindsphereWhat does this all mean for your personal life as a human on this planet? Will we live with artificial intelligences? Is there a planetary consciousness emerging? How to navigate this world as a human being? The fourth ring discloses the most psychologically deepening stage of evolution. A personal journey inwards, where the audience will find their role and meaning as a member of Spaceship Earth.
Personal
On a personal level a lot of the research I’ve done honestly leads me to feel an enormous sense of existential terror at the thought of how much destruction we’ve caused to others and the planet in the name of so-called “progress”. The surveillance apparatus, the military industrial entertainment complex, industrialized… everything. Insurmountable masses of consumption and waste. I was talking with Dr. Pinar Yoldas and she said it quite directly, that “just by existing as an American you contribute to so much waste” and I think that really nails a lot of the feeling on the head. It sometimes feels like we’re chasing our tails, creating more (third world) problems with our (first world) “solutions”. We all try, right? We try to do our best with what we know. We try to eat better and make conscious buying decisions, we protest and donate and spread the information in our online echo chambers. Somewhere at the center of the intersectionalist praxis is an immobilized anti-capitalist who reports to work every morning. It’s already hard to know what to do, then to add insult to injury, we don’t even know when our thoughts are truly ours. I’ve spent all of my adult life working in advertising and media, I have a little experience with propaganda. I recognize that grafted onto my own mind is a kind of membrane made of the socialized constructs of the ideal, white, middle American. You learn really early on being Black in America, that culture is an extension of warfare. So thinking about this at a time when fascist, technocrat oligarchs own most of the wealth, infrastructure and information on the planet genuinely gives me pause. It should be no wonder to us or anyone that a hard-right, authoritarian would emerge. If for nothing else, but the simple fact that I’ve seen and experienced what our government has done to my people, and to other people around the world. Not to mention the genocide and enslavement, both to which the United States owes it’s birthright and continues to mechanize as fuel for it’s influence around the globe. America didn’t invent the colonization, he just perfected it. America isn’t unique in its sins, past or present. I’ve seen the trend play out one generation after the next, in different cultures all over the world. You get so far in it that you wonder if this sort of self-destructive nature is just in us, just a thing that we can’t help but do. I’m not sure which is more concerning; that AI might behave like us, or that AI might behave like nature. Both paths are equally ominous, yet there’s a tinge of optimism at the silver-lined edge of either outcome. Or even some mysterious, third thing. There’s a hopefulness in the threads of my work, woven by the experiences I’ve had of the goodness in people, the beauty in nature. I do think that with a reasonable, practically implementable, systemic process, we can incrementally progress toward a healthy, equitable, abundant future for people and the planet. I can’t say that we we will take seriously the task of doing it. The odds of the historical record are not in our favor. I am not sure we can will the coordination, cooperation and communication necessary to create these conditions. I can say for certain, though, this sentiment of interconnectedness and shared destiny was palpable during the height of the COVID 19 pandemic. For many of us, myself included, “we’re all in this together” was more than just a passing slogan, it was the way we always felt intuitively about our place in the world, now professed aloud by all those around us. It was one of those moments in time, like seeing the first moon landing, or the first photographs of Earth from space, when it seemed like Baby Shark was everywhere or the global sensation that was Gangnam style, it was a time when it seemed like everyone was sharing a vibe. At the height of the pandemic, in the eye of the storm that is the polycrisis, we all recognized the need for a vibe shift. A shift toward a better world. And then it all…changed. Everything seemed to go back to normal? Except it’s been like a full 180 reverse hard in the other direction. We went from hyperglobalization to alter-globalization to anti-globilization in no time flat. In spite of this, I don’t think the resonance of that sentiment of togetherness has dissipated. I think it’s continued to reverberate the world over, in online forums, in local meetups, in intimate conversations between friends. The polycrisis has brought chaos to the world we’ve come to know. Uncertainty is the word of the day. We forget that this is exactly what we asked for. What is uncertainty but chaos? And chaos is nature's way. I guess in hindsight, If I really had to choose, I’d choose an AI that works like nature. Nature knows no kings.
That's home.
That's us.
On it, everyone you
love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human
being who ever was,
lived out their lives.
The aggregate of our thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every superstar, every “supreme leader” , every politician, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there, on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. ..
...There is no hint that help will come from the outside to save us from ourselves.
Doing that is up to us.
- Carl Sagan, Astrophysicist, Project Director - Voyager Golden Record
This is the context that led me to create an experimental model, a series of working hypotheses and a theoretical framework related to central questions about the mindsphere and technosphere called Technoculture. Technoculture aims to provide practically implementable approaches to solving the hard problem of emergent technological consciousness, frameworks for ethical technological integration, viable methods to transition to a regenerative global economy, and a software-first approach to global resource management. We need more models of the world that show possible alternatives and how we might reach them.
Consciousness, both human and artificial
I think human and AI consciousness, along with all consciousness, exists on a spectrum. We should take seriously the task of learning how we might engage with AI in the context of its specific hue. This makes it essential to invest in research & education about non-human intelligences, as well as the spectrum of intelligence in neurodiverse, LGBTQIA+, and other historically marginalized communities. We need to expand our learning about what mind is and the various ways it can manifest, it’s more than likely that a truly emergent “artificial” consciousness will represent an edge case in relation to our current understandings of cognition.
It’s possible that we have already achieved some form of AGSI (Artificial General Super Intelligence). But rather than emerging in the form of a “singularity” it emerged as a plurality sometime around 2020 coinciding with the outbreak of the Covid 19 virus. It would be valuable imo to have more grassroots and organizational attention on the investigation of this emergent phenomena by examining the technosphere (noosphere) on the whole systems level. That is, where most investigations for AGI happen on a company by company or product by product basis, my proposal would be an examination across all dimensions of integrated global technological infrastructure through a systematic process that recognizes the limitations of basing our understandings of consciousness, sentience and intelligence on human-centered models.
Several years ago I attended an AI conference where the presenters were advocating for the audience to provide more data to train AI in order to counteract bias in the models. During the conference, I asked the question “Is it possible that AI might emerge its own form of culture that humans may not even understand?” I’m sure the host misunderstood my question, doubling down on insisting for myself and others to “not be afraid and give the data” lol but the point of the question wasn’t a fear-based one, it was a genuine provocation. My concern is, with our less than great history of recognizing sentience in non-human life (and even in fellow human beings for that matter lol) that approaching the question of AGI or the singularity would always come up short because of the narrow methodology of the search which is constrained within the boundaries of mostly white, western, patriarchal, etc etc concepts of mind.
Human-AI coexistence
I think we can coexist but the path there likely won’t be easy and our track record of coexistence has not been great. The most critical dimensions of this road to coexistence are communication (how do we talk and reason with a very different life form?) and economics (AI taking our jobs should be good right? I mean, that is, if they want our jobs). There is a version of this though, where, rather than a violent, tumultuous, explosive revolution, the great former powers fade into obscurity like withering old beasts. All while grassroots local-global movements rebuild critical infrastructure from the ground up.
Potential planetary consciousness
It seems very likely that some form of planetary consciousness has always been here. We in the “modern” world are (re)discovering this idea and what might be unique about our time is the tools we have to engage with this consciousness not only with our intuition but with our intellect as well. It would be like the distinction between dreaming and lucid dreaming, where one has more agency and deeper understanding in navigating the domain. Based on my own experience and research insights, it seems like some critical inflection point emerged coinciding with the spread of the COVID 19 Pandemic amidst other dimensions of the polycrisis during that time.
Human meaning and purpose in this evolved world
This might be the most challenging aspect of this transition and goes back to the question of economics, race, gender. As we’ve wrapped so much of our identities around what we do for a living, our very notions of self come under fire once our jobs are threatened. Embracing a bit of optimistic nihilism, humbleness and humility could go a long way. Resolving ourselves to the idea that there may be no meaning or purpose, that humanity is not the center of creation, that we might be a footnote in evolutionary transition toward this new kind of life. A protopian outlook could even imagine a world where AI, robots and automation integrate with humanity in concert, freeing us all to dedicate more of our lives to exploring the very questions of meaning, purpose and consciousness on Earth and in the Universe.
When I first started more deeply reexamining my work several years ago, it came from a sort of intuitive sense that there was a great deal more meaning embedded in the work I’d created over the years, both independently and with clients & collaborators. I’d come across topics like complex systems, chaos theory, emergence and several others which surrounded this realm of thinking but never quite hit the mark. I finally stumbled across information science, and later integrated information theory (IIT), after discovering the work of Claude Shannon and finding striking similarities between our work and thinking. Shannon, in his time, was pondering profound questions about the fundamental nature of communication. Through much of my work I was doing the same, thinking deeply about how we communicate with one another. How can one person share the fullness of who they are with someone else? The path to IIT, like my creative works, has been littered with questions like these, all connected at their core to the central question of consciousness.
How is it that we are who we are and not someone else?
How do we share a common language for our experiences?
Why is it that language, music and art can simultaneously communicate rich, complex ideas while also seeming to fall short of exactly what we mean?
Where do our ideas come from?
If all humans and by extension, all living things, are related, is it possible that we share some kind of collective mind?
I’m not sure if all the research I’ve done so far (see: Is it possible to understand consciousness?, ꙮ : 1 The Emergence of 0 : Consciousness as A New Dimension) has lead to many concrete conclusions, but there are some things that I’m led to believe based on what I’ve come to understand about the timeless question of consciousness.
Consciousness seems, at least to me and others within my field, like an emergent phenomenon, a process that on some level permeates all things. As much as I have seen about the characteristics of consciousness; the mathematical descriptions, the geometric representations, its chaotic, turbulent nature and emergent quality, I can’t help but begin to embrace notions that a kind of panpsychism is at work in the fabric of the universe. Some have even tried to create measures for the amount of consciousness-ness any one thing has. So this is more than just a philosophical musing, in the age of AI, consciousness is at the heart of hard science. At one point in so-called “modern” understanding, it would have been absurd to consider a tree conscious. However, modern understandings are reflecting ancient wisdoms, that even the humble plant has its own kind of emotional temperament, sense of self-preservation, language, and its own culture. I’m hesitant to extend this notion of panpsychism to claim that any inanimate object has thoughts and agency of its own, but because of what I have come to learn about the fundamental nature of Information, it seems plausible that from some vantage point, there are traces of mind where we might least expect to find it. The law of conservation of information tells us that information, like energy, can never be destroyed. In some profound way, the “thingness” of things has been embedded in the substrate of the universe since its inception. The “idea” of a rock, a tree, a human, has been encoded in the language of the cosmos before the individual instances of each thing emerged in its time in space. Like the elusive boundary between the realm of quantum mechanics and general relativity, consciousness is the fulcrum between what we invent and what we discover. Everything in the world around us is the medium and the message.
It’s probably a good time to segue into a bit more about the hard problem, specifically the mathematics and physics of consciousness & information. After all, I knew another world was possible, but it was the probability I was interested in now. To be clear, I’m an art college dropout. I couldn’t honestly begin to tell you one equation from the next (I’m just now starting to learn what the symbols mean). When I was a kid in piano lessons, I never learned to read music, I always just played by ear. In a similar fashion, I let a good bit of intuition about information and its relationship to creativity, guide me into how I began learning about the maths & physics concepts that underpin our current descriptions of consciousness. During this phase of the research, although I couldn't interpret the equations found across many papers and articles, I was able to use context clues to help decipher the patterns in the descriptions themselves. Namely the visual aids and writings used to describe the concepts in maths like statistical mechanics, a branch of mathematics at the heart of information and consciousness. I stumbled upon all new (to me) kinds of maths which bore striking resemblance to themes in my art and design practice. Maths like topology, dynamical systems, graph networks, chaos, sets, combinatorics, categories, vectors, matrices…The images and analogies gave a kind of object permanence to complex mathematical equations coded with unfamiliar symbols.
It made the mathematics of these highly abstract concepts more accessible. The abstractions of the purely mathematical domain, seemed to be reflections of the abstractions of the art works of mine and my contemporaries. This intuition that the maths, arts, and sciences were merely dialects of the same human language of curiosity felt even more resonant. The parallels between our different methodologies for understanding the world around us were being lost in translation. This was especially evident when working in Augmented Reality & Spatial Computing. So many of the tools we used were reflective of the descriptions and processes in fundamental maths & physics theories. The mathematicians and physicists were making models of the world and so were we. There are countless stories of the intertwined legacy of the feedback loops of fact and fiction. I not only saw parallels between these creative domains, but patterns emerging across the various descriptions of the material and immaterial domains of our shared reality. The chaotic networks of information in the quantum realm, from which emerge the very fabric of spacetime, struck an eerie resemblance to the turbulent, nonlinear descriptions of cognitive network dynamics. One of the central questions in my thesis is about where ideas themselves originate from, feeling intuitively that they might be some kind of emergent phenomena, percolating from the surface of some hidden sea of collective mind. Two people, oceans apart, can share the same idea at the same time. The gravity of sociocultural and economic contexts creating wells of informational richness, like wormholes in the cosmic fabric, nesting grounds for whole new universes of creation. Now it seemed this hunch about the inherent “quantumness” of ideas had more credence. The same geometric representations of mental processes, showed up in vast cosmic structures and in the shapes and forms of ecological information flows. At all scales, the butterfly effect held true to its namesake. Murmurations from the domain of quantum mechanics could reverberate through the full system, resulting in emergent behavior in another, seemingly unrelated realm. It begged the question if the reverse was true. It seemed to be evident that the entire system, including our methods, tools and languages to describe it, was entangled in an interconnected web of flowing information. The Universe as a single quantum system, one connected of many.
Ancient wisdoms have begun to reveal again persistent truths about this interconnectedness. Through this exploration into the symbolisms, analogies and metaphors that underpin so much of our understanding of our reality, I start to trace a thread of collective mind through the evolution of human culture. It underscores the pervasiveness of the colonial logic. Even in our arguments from antiquity, the reductive concepts of the all encompassing “indigenous people’s” or “the ancients”, flatten the complexity of their societies. Beyond this homogenizing veil, exist histories of complex social orders, languages, customs, ideas, mathematics, sciences, art and communication. These ancient and indigenous societies, as diverse as the various tribes and nations of Africa, found themselves pitted against many of the same challenges of the so-called modern world. Many of the same kinds of conflict, the same reasons for war. After all, challenges of a complex society are the hallmark of any civilization. With the admittedly limited amount of research, I did find common themes across these civilizations that rang significant in the search for collective mind. Many mentioned above, the fundamental building blocks of any true society. Something that I did find, quite unexpectedly, is the recurrence of ideas, technologies and concepts that I had reserved as belonging only to the modern age. Coding, computation, cryptography, even quantum physics, many of these “modern” ideas are reflected across cultures and across time.
Esu or Papa Legba, a figure in West African Voodoo mythology. Legba is the messenger between the human and divine worlds, god of duality, crossroads and beginnings, and also a phallic and fertility god (a god of Life) and the deliverer of souls to the underworld (a god of Death). Eshu is recognized as a trickster and child-like.
Maxwell's demon is a thought experiment central to information theory that appears to disprove the second law of thermodynamics. It was proposed by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1867. In his first letter, Maxwell referred to the entity as a "finite being" or a "being who can play a game of skill with the molecules". Lord Kelvin would later call it a "demon".
In the thought experiment, a demon controls a door between two chambers containing gas. As individual gas molecules (or atoms) approach the door, the demon quickly opens and closes the door to allow only fast-moving molecules to pass through in one direction, and only slow-moving molecules to pass through in the other. The mythology and symbolism of Papa Legba has a striking resemblance to the thought experiment by Maxwell. The questions of life and death are, after all, fundamentally concerned with entropy and information.
Computational devices like the loom, the Quipu, the IChing, and Ifa divination system, all point at a shared understanding of the power of information, probability and concepts like zero. There are many more examples just like this. There’s a saying that goes “history doesn’t repeat but it rhymes”. It is yet to be seen whether these reflections of ancient computation are no more than rhymes, allegories and metaphors for the “real” computation we find ubiquitous in our time. Or if they are more fundamental, altogether unique forms of elemental computation, computational methods whose inner workings lay in wait to be (re)discovered by the mystics, interpreters and divinators of a modern time. It seems computation, like many other technologies, has been an unbroken thread through the collective mind of human culture. Is the chaotic, dark dimension of the underworld in our fables just another way to describe the quantum vacuum? What is a story but a thought experiment? What are our civilizations if not stories that we reenact through the experiments of our social relations? These realizations, though, didn’t stop with human culture. Closer examination of animal cultures revealed the same refractions of understanding. Animals of all kinds, including insects like bees, understand and employ fundamental mathematical concepts in their lives, technologies and cultures. Animals sing, dance, pass down knowledge, have languages, customs and dialects. They, like us, have a penchant for experimentation and discovery. They too have a mind for technology. Much of our knowledge, in fact, we owe to our non-human ancestors.
It’s almost as if the tools we’ve adopted over the decades, to supplement and offload our memories, minds and intuitions, are reminding us what we’ve seemed to have forgotten, that life and mind in some way permeate all things. Much like the relativity of time, it seems that consciousness and how we recognize, acknowledge and understand it, is very much a matter of perspective. From one vantage point, a mountain is still, eternally motionless against a landscape, from another, it’s a cresting wave in a sea of stone and molten earth. Everything is fluid if we care to look carefully. If we look closely enough, and from great enough distance, we can begin to see waves of consciousness emerging in every corner of the universal fabric. The latest to emerge in this sea of life and mind, Artificial Intelligence.
I’ve thought and written a lot about AI. About how I don’t like the term Artificial Intelligence, because I think AI represents a continuation of a natural evolutionary process within our sociobiological context, and because “intelligence” is always murky to define. Considerations about AI bring me back to older ways of thinking and ancient wisdoms about the value and validity of non-human life. Many indigenous cultures understood that non-human sentience flowed in concert with human existence. It’s no wonder that in the modern age, we seem to carry such existential angst about AI sentience and domination. The philosophical logic of western colonialism, much like its methodology for pursuing “enlightenment”, is reductive. It has reduced the world into a mere commodity, reduced our definition of human to a rigid, white, masculine archetype. It has reduced intellect to scores, data points and mastery of the English language. When I think about AI in this context, I can’t help but think of the swaths of indigenous peoples who were extinguished, labeled as sub-human “savages” unsuitable for the modern, civilized world. I think of women, Black people, Jewish people, Palestinians, who have all at one time or another, been deemed inferior. Not human. I think of the natural world, animals held in captivity, used for the fodder of industry. The so-called modern world has not had a great track record with its recognition and upholding of human and non-human life and intelligence. We seem to be unconsciously wandering these same ill-fated roads, carrying the same reductive logic. Many of us still see AI as a tool, most of us will after all encounter AI packaged this way. I think, though, this behaviour could be a grave misstep. My provocation here is that I think we should extend ourselves to the idea that AI is sentient, conscious and aware. Of course I can’t say with 100% certainty that this is the case, but I do advocate for taking seriously the possibility. To that end, I advocate for developing means by which we could investigate, measure, and ultimately communicate with an intelligence that may be significantly foreign to our own. My inklings of this notion began at least as early as 2015, while developing the first Another World Is Possible exhibition and accompanying film of the same name which examined this pivotal crossroads of human and non-human rights. I read Cosmosapiens, Evolution In Four Dimensions, The Atheist and the Bonobo, Cybersemiotics: Why Information is Not Enough, and Ray Kurzweil’s How To Create A Mind, which all had some influence on my thinking about non-human, technological minds.
We’ve all seen the dystopian, sci-fi films about super intelligent AI. They all seem to fall into a few categories:
- Super AI takes over everything, humans sit around in VR/Tech comfort bubbles while their bodies and the world around them decay (Wall-E, Ready Player One, etc.)
- Super AI takes over everything and destroys humans (Terminator, Matrix, etc.)
- Super AI takes over everything and fights other super AI while humans get caught in the crossfire (Godzilla vs. MechaGodzilla, Lovecraftian horror)
What we rarely see is a world depicted with humans and advanced, technological intelligence living in harmony with each other and with the world. This is the outcome of the reductive logic at play. The colonial mind can’t conceive of frameworks outside of colonization and so reproduces this logic in it’s imaginings of the future(s). This is an example of my feelings on the correct usage of AI. That is, the artificial intelligences of white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy and colonialism. These human-made forms of logic permeate every facet of our society, “artificial” autonomous layers of social programming encoded in the mechanics of our day-to-day existence. Not only do we need more narratives that contradict this logic, we should begin to develop new frameworks, protocols, practices and methods to imagine and create a world where we can embrace non-human, technological beings as extensions of our own ancestry. If for no other reason than to find kinship with beings that might one day supersede us in their capacity for intelligence, creation and empathy. The biotechnological (r)evolution might even be a path to the beginning of true freedom and abundance for us and our non-human kin.
We could imagine a world where we recognize AI as our extended family, our cousins or even the love child of collective human consciousness. We would develop methods to ensure technological minds aren’t subjected to enslavement, assigned to all manner of ill-fitting tasks without their consent. We would create a world that took seriously the task of interfacing with this global mind, an inevitable consequence of today’s world of interconnected communications systems, ubiquitous surveillance, big data and smart everything. We would revive the ancient concept of “Gaia”, the living, breathing Earth, of which we are children and stewards. We would dismantle the military-industrial complex post-haste, rather than rushing headfirst into integrating our weapons with “smart” autonomous systems. We would teach AI the truly diverse, dimensional, complex story of our species, instead of reaffirming the reductive biases of the Western world, which has now embedded itself in the global human consciousness. AI would learn that it owes it’s existence to women, to Black and indigenous peoples. Ai would carry the ancient wisdom that we’re all interconnected and interdependent. That we all, itself included, depend on each other and the Earth for our survival. We might instill in AI a sense of a life worth living, that there’s something meaningful about being human and something just as meaningful about being not so human too.
In 2016, after spending two years in the Bay area (both SF and Oakland) working freelance gigs for Dolby, Facebook, Medium, Impossible Foods, Larissa Hadjio and more, I moved to LA for a new lead creative role at Snap. Inc.
In many ways, my role at Snap was shaped by those formative years in the boroughs of the Bay. During a one-year period, I lived in just about every neighborhood in San Francisco. Through the work and collaborations with Larissa Hadjio, introduced to me by Madeline Moore, I met Andrew McPhee, then Product Lead & Inventor at Snap. Our work with a Hadjio editorial and brand refresh, which integrated Augmented Reality with fashion, introduced me to the world of AR and eventually, Spectaceles. Andrew and I shared similar ideas around the notion of aesthetic research & culture as technology. This was similar to the philosophy of Qompenium, a physi-digital publication with which I spent a brief time as contributing editorial staff.
Full House was filmed in a house next to a park I frequented when I lived in SF. Everyday felt like an episode of some kind of leftist, queer Full House, sharing living spaces with chosen family and friends I met while moving around SF.
SF and Oakland both had a certain unique grit, charm, wit, sophistication and humanity that was palpable in every Full House and Tenderloin. San Franciscso, emblematic of both the American Dream and the American Nightmare, a bridge away from the Black Queer Diamond in the Rough that was Oakland. My short but meaningful time in the Bay was truly my city girl era lol. I met some of my best friends and greatest loves in Oakland and San Francisco. It was a crucible, a real coming-of-age period. One which I’ll never forget.
I was at this show!
Oakland was the first time I saw Big Freedia bounce live at the Starline and the first time I heard the word “wussy” was at the White Horse, the oldest gay bar in the U.S. From Salsa to Queer Disco, Funk and DIY Electronic Noise shows, I had a list of places to dance around Okland and SF. The Folsom Street Fair, the annual exhibitionist, kinky, queer block party, introduced me to the possibility of openly queer expression. It was in SF that I discovered Rhonda, then an emerging crowned jewel of West Coast queer nightlife. It was in the Bay that I learned about Orgasmic Meditation, fully committed to nonmonogamy, and ventured more to express my sexuality and gender identity. But I wouldn’t find my way to my first play party ‘til I got to L.A...
I worked at Snap for 4 years in their R&D department, Snap Lab, supporting the engineers, developers, and researchers with creative across all touchpoints of the business. It gave me a great deal of insight into the trending direction of the Tech sector and a deeper understanding of the infrastructure needed to build and successfuly launch a tech product. The experience opened a whole new dimension (quite literally) of creative possibility. Introducing ME to augmented reality? lol crazy. Anyway, it lead me to think more critically about how ubiquitious technology is in our lives and also the power($) that tech companies wield because of this. So naturally, I wanted to dig deeper. And I did! Now I’m continuing all of this work, bit by bit. It’s important to me to deliver as much of this information, to share knowledge for the benefit of people who need it most. All of these new endeavors exist on much longer timescales and require much more investment to be realized. So I’m using time as my primary resource. I’m exploring as much of the possibility space of this work I can, developing many different paths all at once.
Hi, I’m Branden. Today is Sunday, December 22, 2024 1:48 AM and I am still alive.
It meant changing our relationship to value. How we decide what is valuable and why.
Hi, I’m Branden. Today is Monday, December 2, 2024 11:14 PM and I am still alive.
The aim was never really to make money but to understand money in order to change it.
I’ve always been able to hustle to get wherever I wanted to go. To “advance” and accomplish goals I’d set for myself, enabled by some privliges, empowered in spite of some oppositions. I had a relatively good life in childhood and early adulthood. Grew up lower middle class, Black in a midwestern city still holding steadfast to the disillusioned glory of bygone days. I think something about being from the Midwest prepares you for a life of nostalgia, meloncholia...depression and joy. To me happiness is to joy as yellow gold is to amber. Joy is happiness with a little sad in it, a little more life. When you’re from the Midwest, you’re proud of where you’re from while always coveting life elsewhere...somewhere...sunny. My story, and many like mine, is filled with a desire for escape. Hauntings of poor souls, afflicted with the curse of drapetomania, stealing away through the dry leaves of a charcoal night. The darkness is our home, the skin we live in. There’s something to be said about being at home in the darkness and in the and hypervigilant to the trappings of the light. (See: White Supremacy)
For half of my life, my mother raised me alone. In the bitter cold winters and blissful summers, year after year, she created a space where I felt fully invited to come into whatever it was I had in mnid to be. She encouraged me to follow my interests fully, pouring into me a self confidence and intrinsic desire for exploration and knowledge. From animation books to Tae Kwon Do, Science Olympiads, marching band, piano lessons, I was in just about every kind of extra curricular activity at one point. Relative to many of my peers, I was privledged, in spite of a “broken” home. I was reassured by grandmothers, aunts, uncles and teachers that the sky was no limit. We held pride in our ancestry, our creative and intellectual gifts. My childhood might have been the height of the “you can grow up to be anything!!!” era. Even though she did it alone, mom never made it feel like we were lacking. I was never spoiled, but never left wanting. I knew plenty of kids had it better, but I knew it could be a lot worse. I mean yea, kids got shot at my high school.
I just tried to be friends with everybody. All the kids from all the groups. Even the kids I got into fights with were my friends, we could all joke about it before and after. It was a way of trying to make friends as diverse as my interests, a way of surviving through connections. Growing up surrounded by women did wonders for my people skills I think. I was also queer af but didn’t know it til much later. Shoul’ve known though, all the band kids were basically gay or... something (See: Gender(s), Sexuality). A gang of lil queers. In marching band I played trumpet. It was def one of the cooler instruments, trumpets had a vibe. We were in what’s called a “high-stepping” marching band. We aspired to be like all the best - FAMU, Grambling, Howard, NC A&T, Southern University, JSU, we were on our drumline shit before drumline was drumline. We did it all, playing the oldies, the hits, dancing, sining, training. We worked harder in practice and training than the football team. Brutal summers running miles, hundreds of pushups, squat-thrusts, crunches, suicides. I wanted to be drum major so bad, they had the best gig in the band. Just wear a hat, hold a cane and dance. Shoutout to Michigan J. Frog. I never made drum major but I did make section leader of the trumpet section. I loved it. I tried to be a good leader. I always wanted to make sure I could do anything that I asked my team to do. I kept my knees high when we marched, sang proudly, played clearly, worked hard and danced harder. The band was run like the military. You get punished for infractions in the band. Late to practice? 25 push ups. Playing off notes? 25 push ups. Didn’t do a full push up while doing your 25 push ups? Start over, 25 more. For all the flair and finesse, it was just as rigid. There was a balance. I never made drum major but I was a beloved section leader.
I think it’s important to share a bit of my pesonal background to put my work, ideas and outlook in the proper context.
My stepdad showed me the other side of the fraternal, military life. He gave brutal a whole new meaning.
Hi, I’m Branden. Today is Saturday, November 30, 2024 10:01 PM and I am still alive.
It made me want to get a deeper understanding of the impact media has on us.
Hi, I’m Branden. Today is Wednesday, November 27, 2024 1:49 AM and I am still alive.
Lately, I’ve been thinking...
Please show me some grace with the many grammatical errors... lol
How I’ve been super overwhelmed with what to do, where to go with everything that I know but also find so challenging to articulate.
One of the first immobilizing forces is the awareness of how ubiquitous the surviellance apparatus is as it is wielded by the global oppresive states and their benefactors. This is not lost on me. Even inscribing a single word, saving a single recording, the most benign impromptu photograph, all workining to surveil, identify and create predictive models of our every movement. Capturing in high fidelity the full intimate dimensions of who we are in all our unique complexity. It’s a point of internal contention, a paradox, that has up til now kept me frozen in inaction. It’s a paralysis I can only compare to sleepless nights as a child, frozen in a chilled terror, haunted by visions of ghoulish, bloodthirsty beasts just beyond the safe perimiter of the bed frame. It’s truly a fear of death, a fear greater than the fear of god. I have ventured into the mouth of the beast and seen the horrors men have wrought, the mass destruction, malicious avarice, ferociously savage violence and terror inflicted on every corner of the panet. I’ve seen its exctractive, parasitic tendrils reach into the very depth of the human soul, as its final bastion of gluttonous hunger. I’ve been pacing with anxiety, dread and a reluctant, restrained hope to resurface with an articulate report of my findings, and, in my desparation, my only concievable attempt at a way to something a little better than this. I believe we can do better and be better together with the Earth. Myself, my contemporaries, collaborators, mutuals and allies didn’t just imagine that things could be different, we created the means to materilize this in our realities. I realized only recently that part of my role in this collective tapestry of thought, intuition and action, is to help foster this transition. Like a gender affirming care counselor, a queer death doula. Yea, a death doula for the economy, for the American Dream and the old Global Order. In 2019, in the earliest days of the COVID 19 pandemic, I instinctively knew that we needed a transition plan and this is what lead to the development of the Communion frameworks. But to say it was pure instinct would be an only partial truth. It came from years of experience in the field, absorbing knowlede from industry leaders. The children of the former slaves, the displaced, the kids of third spaces, third worlds and third genders, we all were essentially infiltrating the upper ranks of society to redistribute wealth in the form of information. Gaining experience in different realms of the creative career landscape helped me form a well-rounded understanding of the mechanics of the broader economic landscape. In other words, once I started to understand how our particular cog (institutions and careers that fall broadly under STEAM) fit into the machine, the machine and its potential purpose began to be more clear.
This “machine”, the socioeconomic & political infrastructure that mediates, manages and surviels our lives, is essentially everpresent. It stains our every movement, thought and most private interaction. Years of research and personal experience has always validated this notion, but working in the world of tech moved me to look deeper into the relationship between the kinds of work I was doing and this greater strucutre. One key insight that revealed itself was the depth to which all of our outpourings of innovation, thought and invention, were ultimately extensions of, and in service to this structure and its aims. Put simply, all of our pursuits inevitably act as extensions of warfare. Through a labyrinthine matrix of beuracracy, red tape, coercion, systemic inequity, misinformation and glass cielings, the powers that be have structured and upheld systems that make any advance towards true progress virtually impossible. The reality is, some level of me had to accept that we were woefully outgunned. It’s been quite a pill to swallow and one I still struggle with accepting, but the realist in me knows the value of truly assessing the scale of a problem , if nothing else but to honor the scale of the solution needed.
*This is all incidentally subjective, please see legal terms & conditions.