biko.cabral (time/place)

Nolan Oswald Dennis
biko.cabral (time/place), 2020
Receipt printer, microcontroller
Variable Dimensions

Biko.Dialogues The works in the series simulate dialogues between Bantu Steve Biko (the leader of the South African black consciousness movement ) and other liberation theorists from the black consciousness tradition. These works are digital and physical systems designed to perform poetic conversations between Biko and his intellectual and spiritual counterparts based on a series of keywords extracted from the archive’s these now dead activists left behind, in the form of interviews, autobiographies, academic theory, poems and court transcripts. The conscious always operates in relation to its own unconscious. These dialogue works are automated systems for approximating a kind of black liberation dreaming. These simple systems take the archive of black consciousness thought as an archive of black subconsciousness. These artworks perform various automatic readings and writing operations on datasets pulled from the archive, in order to algorithmically reach toward a place of collective dreaming. These systems use the archive of black conscious literature (from these various activists) as source material for a dataset which is algorithmically recombined to produce new dialogues between Biko and his counterparts, which are then printed in real time as an endless receipt. The receipt acts as a record of these impossible conversations. These works also stage another dream, where Biko had a chance to meet and talk and dream together with other activists in a global black radical tradition. There are 5 dialogues in this series: two versions of the Biko.Fanon dialogue (with revolutionary French-Algerian psychiatrist Franz Fanon) ; A Biko.Cesaire dialogue (with negritude poet Aime Cesaire) ; A Biko.Shabazz dialogue (with African American radical activist El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz - better known as Malcolm X); A Biko.Cabral dialogue (with Guinean revolutionary Amilcar Cabral)