MultiPlanetary Garden

AfroRithm Futures Group: Ahmed Best, Dr. Lonny J. Avi Brooks, and Jade Fabello, in collaboration with Dr. Drew Endy, Jesse Gilbert, Raquel Horsford, Malaya, and Oguri

2024

Live performance, video installation; dimensions variable.

Presented as part of Emergence: Art from Life

MultiPlanetary Garden is the product of an ongoing multi-disciplinary collaboration between AfroRithm Futures Group (Ahmed Best, Dr. Lonny J. Avi Brooks, and Jade Fabello) and Fathomers. This collaboration began in 2018 with the live world-building game AfroRithms From the Future. AfroRithms is a cooperative design, exploration, and storytelling game that centers vibrant and nuanced Black and Indigenous perspectives. Originally created as an in-person, facilitated event, the game moved online in spring 2020 and has been presented as a workshop for the Institute for the Future, Dynamicland, Black Speculative Arts Movement Festival, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, UNESCO Futures Literacy Summit, SUNY Buffalo Humanities Institute, Museum of Children’s Art Community Futures School, Stanford University’s d.school, and more.

Hosting the game at Stanford University brought Brooks, Best and Fabello into contact with another important collaborator: Dr. Drew Endy, a member of the bioengineering faculty and one of the pioneers of synthetic biology.

In 2021 and 2022, Brooks and Best embarked upon the next stage in their vision: to create an AfroFuturist nation in the “pluriverse” of virtual reality, which they call the Astro Egalitarian Virtual Network, or AEVN. AEVN invites artists, scientists, writers, educators, and others to grapple with the possibilities and challenges of the virtual landscape for Afrofuturist thought. As human lives become increasingly cyborgian, AEVN seeks to help the world imagine (and survive) a future of rapid social and ecological change and newly blended virtual/reality by looking to ancestral intelligence, marginalized voices, and the rediscovery of lost Black and Indigenous stories.

MultiPlanetary Garden takes this vision and embodies it. Through a cycle of dances, audiences inhabit a future in which synthetic biological advancements have helped to create an egalitarian, multiplanetary society. In collaboration with Dr. Endy, Best and Brooks imagine how biosynthesis could make abundance the rule rather than the exception, allowing life of all kinds to flourish across the galaxy. Los Angeles-based projection artist Jesse Gilbert and choreographers Raquel “Rocky” Horsford, Malaya, and Oguri depict the planting of gardens and the celebration of the harvest in a performance that begins with individual dancers and culminates in communal movement. Brooks and Best offer MultiPlanetary Garden as an opportunity to embrace how ancestral and Indigenous technologies of dance, storytelling, and agronomy may reframe Western assumptions about how body and environment interact. “Rather than colonize,” write Brooks and Best of the project’s multiplanetary setting, “We respect the dignity of all the life we encounter—life being a term we see as ever evolving and defining. Not life as we know it but life as we learn it.”

— Natasha K. Boyd