Black Quantum Futurism

This presentation of Wait Time // Watch Night Service by Black Quantum Futurism (BQF) features a hypnotic spoken word performance by Rasheedah Phillips, punctuated by striking voice modulations within a pulsing and disquieting soundscape by Camae Ayewa (aka Moor Mother). Based on a longer essay by Phillips titled “Waiting/Weighting/Wading Time: Juneteenth, Watch Night, and Emancipation Day,” this language-based presentation uncovers complex and often startling interrelationships of meaning and message between the aforementioned homonyms, Black histories, and their implications for Black futures through a galvanizing synthesis of speech, sound, and sensation.

The performance itself bears the hallmarks of an improvisational yet highly integrated exchange between two artists whose close collaboration over many years has yielded a richly productive dynamic between their individual and mutual practices and interests. Interweaving concepts and their applications at the intersections between science (especially quantum theories), sound, poetry, politics, literatures, legal process (specifically housing law), and publishing, BQF powerfully distills how time under racial capitalism is instrumentalized to uphold societal structures that remain deeply invested in ongoing violence and oppression. Within a White western timeline that always already forecloses on Black futures, BQF wages a multidimensional campaign of resistance, subversion, active engagement, and strategic refusal that effectively makes possible a resetting of the atomic clock for past, present, and future Black lives.

Through an extraordinarily prolific and multipronged collective practice, which includes gallery exhibitions, participatory workshops, public art programs and projects, live performances and lectures, videos and recordings, temporal libraries, and a robust publishing practice that from the very beginning set the prescient stage for Black Quantum Futurism’s theory and practice, BQF pursues a strategy of communication-as-dissemination that has spread their world-changing parables far and wide against emancipation’s continued deferral, into a present and future where freedom may begin to take root and flourish in real time.

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In the wake of the pandemic, the works of Octavia E Butler saw a major resurgence as mass culture finally began to recognize the prescience of her words. Writing in the mid-1990s, Butler's Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents prophetically describe, in brutal yet often exquisitely sparing — and thus shattering — detail, the collapse of contemporary society under the crushing weight of its own collective apathy, complicity, and denial of what should have been avertible root causes.

Such causes and their effects, so accurately diagnosed by Parables character (and doctor) Taylor Bankole as the accidental collision of longstanding climatic, economic, and socio-cultural crises, have long been deeply felt, urgently explicated, and powerfully resisted against by those most marginalized under the dominant power structures invested in maintaining the disastrous status quo. Since their inception Black Quantum Futurism has understood the power of dissemination in combating misinformation and spreading new knowledge, resources, and tools for protest and subversion of would-be hegemonic timelines that actively disinclude Black women, femmes, transwomen, and girls from wider futures. Given the multiplicity of ways in which Black people are actively erased across the White western timeline — from past, present, and future — Black Quantum Futurism embraces writing, theorizing, publishing, documenting, and disseminating as crucial communication-based strategies that restore, prevent, or overwrite these erasures.

One example of how they do this is through the inclusion of libraries as key parts of their exhibitions and events, through which they support, share, and amplify the works of such authors and artists as Octavia E Butler, Tananarive Due, Toni Cade Bambara, Gloria Naylor, Julie Dash, Ursula K LeGuin, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and others. BQF also pursues their own astonishingly prolific publishing practice, releasing zines, co-edited publications, guidebooks, poetry, theories, and stories, often with accompanying soundscapes, as an integral part of their artistic output. What unites these works is a deeply pragmatic approach to theory as something to be applied — not as a set of abstract principles by which to speak about the world, but as a set of possibilities through which one might be enabled to survive it.

Constellation 8/∞ (Octonionic Constellation) is a sonic celebration of writing by Octavia E Butler that predates the current fascination by several years. Produced in 2014, it represents BQF's love for both Butler and wordplay, as the title and 8-track structure reference the latin roots of both the words Octavia and Estelle (the author's middle name). As an early example of their experimentation with sound and audio composition, Constellation 8/∞ is a genuine DIY affair, embodying an unfussy punk aesthetics of urgency and necessity. With most tracks clocking in well under 2 minutes, the album yet manages to capture and convey the menacing and claustrophobic intensity that permeate Butler's unsettling worlds. Layering and distorting sounds, samples, and spoken word in the form of audiobook excerpts from Butler's novels, and in one case, the voice of the author herself, they maximize an additive approach to audio collage that expands on Butler's many troubled worlds in ways this reader feels the author might truly appreciate.

As a genre, BQF (and Camae Ayewa specifically, in her music practice as Moor Mother) have been developing soundscapes from the very beginning of their collaboration. From the bedroom to the studio to CERN, BQF critically and poetically tune the interrelationships of samples, scales (both musical and quantum mechanical), and the socio-politics thereof as markers and makers of time itself. Drawing from across the space-time continuum of quantum theory and the interwoven histories and fabrics of music and writing, primarily from the wellspring of Black diasporic cultural production, they fashion richly intertextual auralities — and oralities — that speak new nonlinear and thus radically liberatory timelines into being, where Black lives are no longer forced into the lockstep rhythms of hegemonic fatalistic — and fatal — futures.

Before the pandemic, the presentation of this digital album was originally being developed for physical interaction within a contested space for a media arts centre in downtown Toronto. Eight hardcover editions of Octavia E Butler novels, six of which are represented by the audiobook excerpts included the album, were in the process of being fitted with audio components in order to play the tracks when opened. BQF envisioned an aleatory experience of the audio, as multiple visitors would be able to engage with more than one book at a time, generating new iterations of the work through unpredictable overlaps. These "audio-books" were planned to be displayed on an inclined shelf with seating provided for anyone who might want to read beyond the excerpted portion in the soundscape.

For this post-pandemic return to digital, the trace of the intended physical experience is apparent in the web-based interaction. Visitors to the project page are invited to "open" up to two books at a time as a gesture to this aleatory potential. In developing the interaction, it was a pleasant surprise to realize a kind of internal consistency between the otherwise disparate audio environments that each track unfolds, such that adding the sound of one track to another results in a complex kind of sonic integration rather than simple dissonance or cancellation. Perhaps in this we might finally conceive an apt description for the ever-evolving multiplicity that is Black Quantum Futurism's critical collective practice.

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