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COSMIC ARCHAEOLOGY: TOWARDS A CINEMA OF THE (DIGITAL) ARCHIVE EMILIO tAIVEAHO PELAEZ

Today, we'll be working with John Akomfrah's The Last Angel of History (1995) and Jenn Nkiru's Black to Techno (2019), two films that move along the riffs and rifts of optical reality and science fiction, myth and history, cinema and poetry.

I argue that both of these films present a critical and creative method of archival engagement that allows us to grapple with the legacies of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in order to envision more humanly workable futures.

Here are the top three definitions provided by Google. These definitions all foreground a concern with "the past," suggesting that history is concerned with events that have happened, or with things that have come before us, implying a sense of time. Let's look at the word etymologically:
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, and following the Latin and Greek inflections of the word, we see that history serves an epistemic function; that is, history is concerned with producing knowledge through an inquiry of what has been recorded in the past. Further, we see, in the top definition of the word, an emphasis on narration, story-telling, and chronology:
"How can there a true History, when we see no man living is able to write truly the History of last week?" Asks English Poet Thomas Shadwell in 1688. From a critical perspective, this question remains valid, 333 years later. How, indeed, do we identify "true History"?

These definitions thus give rise to a series of problems: How do we study the past? Why do we study the past? How is the past preserved? What does it mean for something to be "recorded" in history? And consequently, what is left out of the historical record?

BLACK TO TECHNO (2019)

Of the film, anOther Magazine writes: "The short, which debuted at Frieze Los Angeles, explores the origins of Detroit’s techno culture, linking the city’s once-thriving automobile industry with the mechanical sound which subsequently exploded onto dancefloors the world over. Part history lesson, part visual art project, Black to Techno unearths a major aspect of techno music that is often forgotten: its foundation as a historically black sound.

'My hope is that all individuals with some level of curiosity can come into these things and see aspects of themselves, or at least be curious about things they don’t know,' Nkiru explains of the film, which collates archival film clips, samples, and interviews with Detroit’s music legends.

As such, the film defies categorization – though it has elements of a documentary, it is more like a trail of consciousness, illuminating the inner workings of Nkiru’s mind, and her background in music videos, and visual art. Black to Techno at once catalogues an important part of music history, while serving as a work of art itself..."

ARTnews writes:

"Filmmaker and writer Jenn Nkiru recently released a “social anthropological” experimental short film entitled BLACK TO TECHNO that animates, as she puts it, the “cosmic archaeology” of Techno and its indirect and direct influence. Nonlinear in form and originally commissioned by Frieze and Gucci, BLACK TO TECHNO, subtly examines factories (actual and conceptual) and their position in modernity, as well as the relationships, involving human bodies, machines, and spirit, that come into being in and because of them."

"The twenty-minute film begins with the origin myth of the Deep Sea Dwellers created by the Techno group Drexciya, a narrative that coincided with their sonic makings. A voice orates: “Basically there is some sort of underwater country that is inhabited by the unborn children of pregnant women who were thrown off the slave ships during the Middle Passage and drowned.…” Drexciya fans know that the foundation story continues with these unborn children, who continue to breathe through amniotic fluid. As this tale is recalled in the film, large speakers appear with a dark cosmic background as the introduction concludes. What follows is archival footage of Black women working in agricultural spaces during the early 1900s, the maternal products of the slave factory—former slaves and descendants of slaves—laboring to build out U.S. territory, birthing and breeding more commodities for incubation."

The film raises a series of questions:

How does Black to Techno conceive of "history"? What is the function of the archival material interspersed throughout the film? How does the film map connections between past, present, and future? What is the role of music in preserving history?

How does the film frame the relationships between the history of Detroit, the Americans, the pan-African diaspora, and contemporary black music(s)?

What are the relationships tradition, memory, and history? How are these categories negotiated (specifically through music) by communities in Detroit? How do architectural spaces create new sonic possibilities?

New Bethel Baptist Church

What is the relationship between "Myth" and "History"? What's at stake in this distinction?

How does the film employ the word "techne"? What is the relationship between techne, techno, and technology?

What might Nkiru mean by "cosmic archaeology"? How does archaeology differ from, or supplement, "history"?

To answer some of these questions and refine our understanding of Nkiru's film, as well as of the legacies of Detroit techno, the the Pan-African Diaspora, and the practice of "cosmic archaeology," it will be helpful for us to turn to John Akomfrah's seminal documentary The Last Angel of History (1996), which will give us the method to find our answers.

THE LAST ANGEL OF HISTORY

RECASTING AMERICAN HISTORY THROUGH THE LENS OF SCIENCE-FICTION

The Last Angel of History engages the intersections of the Pan-African diaspora, music, science-fiction, space/time travel, technology, and literature. The form of the narrative (as simultaneously a science-fiction narrative and a documentary)—characterized by its use of fragmentation, quick, sharp cuts, jumps, and psychedelic sequencing—exposes the limitations of linear, occidental story-telling techniques and forwards a critique of western historiography. By actively de-familiarizing our preconceptions and presuppositions about time, experience and belonging, the film challenges its viewers to actively think through its content and concepts, giving us a series of "fragments, techno fossils," that must be actively sutured together to reveal the film's "code."

Throughout Akomfrah's film, we follow a mysterious character -- "another hoodlum, another bad boy scavenger poet figure" -- known as the "Data Thief," who guides us through the vaults of pan-African time, memory, history, and music.

We are told that "200 years into the future, the data thief has been told a story. If you can find the crossroads, a crossroads, this crossroads, if you can make an archaeological dig into this crossroads, you'll find fragments, techno fossils. And if you can put those elements, those fragments, together, you'll find the code.

Crack that code, and you'll have the keys to your future."

Perhaps this is the Data Thief's philosophy of history.

For this figure, the past arrives as traces of undeciphered fragments of information, communicative clues that point towards the possibility of constructing another time, another future, another world. The past, in other words, serves as the generative repository of a future that does not yet exist, and is capable of fundamentally transforming the world we live in ("cosmic archaeology").

Here are some key fragments, gathered by the Data Thief, which will perhaps get us closer to deciphering the film's "code":

"Greg Tate is the writer who argued that black people in America certainly live the estrangement that science fiction writers talk about. All the stories about alien abduction, all the stories about alien spaceships taking subjects from one planet and taking them to another, genetically transforming them, Greg is really saying-- Greg is kind of recasting American history in the light of science fiction and saying, well, look all those things that you read about alien abduction and genetic transformation, they already happened. How much more alien do you think it gets than slavery, than these entire mass populations moved and genetically altered, entire status moved, forcibly dematerialized? It doesn't really get much more alien than that."

"The first touch with sci-fi is when the slaves were using drums to communicate over the distance. So the slave owners would institute reforms that the slaves were no longer allowed to play certain rhythms, if at all. And they weren't allowed to speak even their own languages. And they had to learn the slave master's language which was English in Jamaica or in the States or Spanish or Portuguese. But there was always a sense of displacement of the original "code" of their language, and drums with the new code, or the downloaded new information had to be downloaded into the cortex or whatever."

"Most science fiction tales dramatically deal with how the individual is going to contend with these alienating, dislocating societies and circumstances. And that pretty much sums up the mass experience of black people within the post-slavery 20th century world."

If history is a story we tell ourselves (or that is told to us) about the past, who tells that story? Whose story is it to be told? What are the fragments we include into our stories and why? What does the past tell us about the present? Who controls the past? How is the past ordered or understood?

"Now, the story goes that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads in the Deep South. He sold his soul. And in return, he was given the secret of a black technology, a black secret technology, that we know to be known as the blues. The blues begat jazz. The blues begat soul. The blues begat hip hop. The blues begat R&B."
Through the figure of Robert Johnson, music becomes "a black technology, a black secret technology," loaded with information, culture, history, spirit, myth, and meaning. But what does this technology do and how does it function?
"He's in the land of African memory. In the history vault, a woman says, 'it's after the end of the world/ Don't you know that yet?' Confused, the Data Thief returns to the future."

"Detroit is a symbolic location in American culture because it's where the American automotive industry's heart was. It was the sort of industrial space. But once one encounters the information industry, those industries are now in decay. So now Detroit becomes a relic. It's a decaying structure at a crossroads, so to speak.

Techno coming out of Detroit represents that kind of urban youth's view of change, of saying, no longer do we have this industrial base. No longer do we have this security anymore. Everything is flux."

"In the 18th century, slaves like Phillis Wheatley read poetry to prove that they were human, to prove that they weren't furniture, or to prove that they weren't robots, and to prove that they weren't animals. In that sense, a certain idea of cybernetics is already being applied to a black subject ever since the 18th century. I think what we get at the end of the 20th century in music technology is a point where producers willingly take on the role of a cyborg, willing to take on that man-machine interface just to explore the mutation that's already happened to them and to accelerate them some more. Now, the question is, like cyborgs, for what? Well, the reason is, of course, to get out of here, to get out this time here, this space now."

ADDITIONAL EXAMPLES:

BLACK (AMERICAN) SONIC EXPERIMENTALISMS

HORIZONS OF BELONGING: MUSIC & COLLECTIVE IDENTITY

Jimi Hendrix "The Star-Spangled Banner (Live at Woodstock, 1969)"

Hendrix enlisted in the army on May 31, 1961 and was assigned to the 101st Airborne Division, where he was stationed in Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

What is the role of National Anthems? When are they sung, and for what purpose?

How does the National Anthem express notions of community, belonging, and identity? What is role does music play in shaping ideas of nationhood and community?

How do we make sense of the past? How do we make sense of the fragments we receive, and towards what purpose? How does an understanding of the past shape ideas of belonging, community, and identity?

[TRIGGER WARNING: there is sensitive content, including explicit depictions/descriptions of physical violence, sexual violence, and other atrocities, in the archive that follows.]

FRAGMENTS... TECHNO FOSSILS...
Child convicts forced to labor in North Carolina. Photo by John Spivak
"These four men, Jerry Williams, George Davis, Willie Williams, and Albert Robertson, were lynched in Iverness, Florida on April 19, 1892 after being implicated in the murders of two men, identified as Paymaster Stevenson and Mail Carrier Payne, bosses at the phosphate mine where the men were employed. According to a newspaper report from the St. Paul Daily Globe, "A mob surrounded the jail, overpowered the sheriff and hanged the men to trees nearby." From the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
from Ku Klux Klan periodical The Fiery Cross (1922). How is "Whiteness" being constructed/depicted, here?
The Scottsboro Boys
Photo by Robert Frank
"Unveiling of Confederate Monument at University" (speech by Julian Shakespeare Carr)
"Unveiling of Confederate Monument at University" (speech by Julian Shakespeare Carr)
Street scene near bus station in Durham, North Carolina (1940)