Warpmode: Afrovoidism

Black Beyond’s Warpmode is a conceptual card game and social experience created by artist Jazsalyn to stimulate conversations grounded in Black Metatheories: Afrofuturism, Afronowism, Afrovoidism, and Afropocalypse. In the game, players draw cards and respond to existential prompts to reconfigure Black social and theoretical frameworks.

The game has lent itself to a multipart series—co-presented by Onassis ONX and Pioneer Works, in partnership with Metalabel—in which Jazsalyn, the Artistic Director of Black Beyond, has curated sessions to converse with various artists who have deep insights into a focus metatheory, before inviting audience members to partake directly in Warpmode.

For the fourth and final session in this series, she, together with Anastasia Corrine and Terence Nance, will engage the theme of Afrovoidism. Corrine refers to “The Afrovoid(ism)” as a fictive ecology and conceptual framework, which considers the immortality of the Black psyche. It exists on the spectrum of immortality as dignified—every genre of music created by Black America—and a wish gone wrong: a viral death. Afrovoidism is their original methodology for demystifying the occupied, uninhabitable oasis of The United States."

About the Artists

Anastasia Corrine (they/them) is an antidisciplinary artist based in New York. Corrine is influenced by the dislocation and boundlessness of the African Diaspora. Their practice is a means to activate liberated temporalities through collective determination. Corrine is a reflex, root, and voidthot. As a voidthot, they sometimes find comfort and sensuality in a cavernous beyond. Using ceramics, electronic media, writing, and gatherings, Corrine is developing methods for digging a hole to the other side. Like a root and its reflex, they are seeking and dirt-loving. Their work has recently been featured at Smack Mellon (NY,NY) and Greenwich Pottery House (NY,NY). They have been an artist in residence at Wave Hill (NY,NY), Institute for Electronic Art (Alfred, NY), and Leipzig International Art Programme (Leipzig, DE). They hold a BFA in Visual Critical Studies from School of Visual Arts.

Jazsalyn is an ONX member and the creator of Black Beyond's Warpmode. Through alternative media and re-indigenization, her practice considers issues regarding data loss, memory restoration, and Ancestral Intelligence. She works with ancestral archives and space data to explore game engines, new AI models, and social experiences as a form of worlding counter-futures. As a lecturer at The New School, she has built curricula on African and Diaspora rituals as speculative technology. She is the Artistic Director of the experimental curatorial project Black Beyond, where she has curated exhibitions and experiences to envision alternate realities for Blackness with Serpentine Arts Technologies, Pioneer Works, ONX Onassis, The New School and more. Afropocalypse is a new conceptual framework by Jazsalyn featured in Warpmode and a forthcoming exhibition. Afropocalypse seeks to reframe Afropessimism through the context of survival and regeneration despite multidimensional periods of apocalypse in Black and Indigenous communities.

Terence Nance is an artist, musician, and filmmaker born in Dallas, Texas in what was then referred to as the State-Thomas community. Nance wrote, directed, scored, and starred in his first feature film, An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and was released theatrically in 2013. In the years following Nance was awarded
the Guggenheim fellowship and the USA Artist Award for his multidisciplinary creative practice. In the summer of 2018, Terence’s Peabody award-winning television series Random Acts of Flyness debuted on HBO to great critical acclaim. The New York Times hailed the show as “hypnotic, transporting and un-categorizable” adding that “it’s trying to disrupt and re-disrupt your perceptions so that, finally, you can see.” In the fall of 2018, Nance wrote and produced Space Jam: A New Legacy, starring Lebron James. In 2020, Terence (under the name Terence Etc.) released his first EP, THINGS I NEVER
HAD followed in 2022 by his debut album V O R T E X on Flying Lotus’s Brainfeeder Label. Most recently he’s collaborated on film and TV projects with TELFAR, Rage Against the Machine, Earl Sweatshirt, and a feature length film experience with Andre 3000's New Blue Sun (Listening). This was followed by his first feature length score for Tayarisha Poe’s The Young Wife. In 2023, Nance collaborated with Blackstar Projects on his first solo museum show SWARM at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. The show featured immersive video installations and opened on the heels of the much anticipated release of Season 2 of Random Acts of Flyness - now called The Parable of the Pirate and the King. The New Yorker described it as “a work of music-like Afrofuturism, the closest thing I’ve seen to a cinematic reflection of the tones and moods of the music of Sun Ra, complete with the mythopoetic dimension.”

About Warpmode

Black Beyond’s Warpmode is a conceptual card game and social experience created by Jazsalyn to stimulate conversations grounded in Black Metatheories: Afrofuturism, Afronowism, Afrovoidism, and Afropocalypse. Through public discussions catalyzed by game-play, the Warpmode program series provokes collective re-thinkings of accepted reality. Each session is curated by Jazsalyn to include a featured artist and moderator-guide who have deep insights into the focus metatheory. Ultimately, Warpmode as a card game and program series designed to open up an expanded space for intentional, anti-hierarchical conversations through Black metatheories.

Warpmode is created by Jazsalyn, Artistic Director, Black Beyond, and available on Metalabel.com.

Black Beyond’s Warpmode Series is co-presented by Onassis ONX and Pioneer Works in partnership with Metalabel.