Juneteenth 2025: Afrofuturism and AfroRithms as a Practice in Building Mothership AI
The Anti-Racist Planning Group (ARPG) is proud to bring Afrofuturist Professor Lonny Brooks to share remotely in honor of Juneteenth celebrations! Open to all SSW community members -please join us for an incredible interactive talk that will be presented remotely, "Afrofuturism and AfroRithms as a Practice in Building Mothership AI". The talk will be streamed live to a lecture hall and will include opt-in audience participation. Stay tuned for the location!
Brooks is a professor in communication at California State University, East Bay and a current visiting professor at the Hasso Plattner Institute for Design at Stanford University. He is one of the premier Afrofuturists in the field, having such accomplishments as co-lead of the Black Speculative Arts Movement in Oakland, co-founder of the Afrorithm Futures Group (ARFG), and co-executive producer of "The AfroFuturist Podcast". His recent work centers on Africana and Indigenous virtual spaces and the Multi-Species Planetary Garden project.
This work has recently been featured in The Guardian and we are thrilled to host this talk at Smith College this summer!
More about Professor Brooks:
Professor Brooks is imagining democratized futures as a lead co-designer of the game Afro-Rithms From The Future. He is a contributing co-author to the anthology “Afrofuturism 2.0: the Rise of Astro-Blackness”. He is lead editor of the first special issue on Afrofuturism in the Journal of Futures Studies, “When is Wakanda?” (Journal of Futures Studies). He is co-organizer of the, Black Speculative Arts Movement in Oakland.
Brooks consults and co-directs the Community Futures School, Museum of Children’s Arts that was recently awarded a Robert Woods Johnson Foundation (RWJF) grant connecting the study of Afrofuturism, Indigenous futurism and Queer futurism in looking at the effect of futures literacy on healing and social justice.
A research affiliate at the Institute For The Future and a research fellow at the Long Now Foundation, he is the author of “From Algorithms to AfroRithms in Afrofuturism” as a contributor to the anthology “Black Experience in Design: Identity, Expression & Reflection”.
Brooks is currently co-editor along with Tobias van Veen of the “Afrofuturist Studies and Speculative Arts” book series with Lexington Press. Working with the Origami Air World Network and the Arthur C. Clarke Center for the Human Imagination at UC San Diego as part of their metaFUTURES series, Brooks and his AfroRithm Futures Group produced the Mothership Series to introduce their Air AfroRithm ship in virtual reality (VR) as a vibrant hub for Afrofuturism establishing our presence in the metaverse, or what they like to call the pluriverse, to celebrate Juneteenth (2022). With the support of the creative research foundation Fathomers and Origami Air Co., they are developing the Astro-Equalitarian Virtual Nation, a safe space for Africana and Indigenous Diasporans in the virtual reality pluriverse.
His most recent project involved playing a leading role as commander of a Mothership space ark a thousand years from now in the Multi-Species Planetary Garden project and film, reframing and creating an anti-colonialist narrative of how space exploration can look like honoring other species and through future visions of community oriented biosynthetic technology.