** All MU Music Research Seminars can be accessed by contacting Dr Laura Watson at laura.watson@mu.ie. **
Professor George E. Lewis (Columbia University)
Spooky Interaction at a Distance: Telematic Afrofuturism
Abstract: The English term “telematics” is a translation of télématique, a merger of the words télécommunication and informatique coined in a 1977 report to the French government that predicted that the convergence of telecommunications and computers would “affect the major instruments of culture: language, in its relations to the individual, and even in its social function; and knowledge, as an extension of collective memory.” While standard origin narratives for telematic art provide no place for Afrodiasporic involvement, the purpose of this talk is to add Afrological value to Eurocentric histories of the relation among art, technology, contextualizing my own Afrotelematic past and speculating on a telematic Afrofuture.