Digital Content

Re-imagining, resistance and Phantasmal forms in digital media culture

Core Aspects / Characteristics

• Non-Linear / Branching / Overlapping Narratives

• Referenced, Reclaimed and/or Remixed Works

• Multiple Meanings / Layered Meanings

• Code Switching / Multiple Audiences

• Improvisation + Transformations

• Generative or Unique Iterations / Play-throughs / Audience Experiences

• Narratives reference digital media technologies (conceptual / content) and/or are driven / distributed by digital media technologies

• Works + Authors in conversation with other Works + Authors

• New Constructions / Opportunities for Meaning Making

Exemplary Phantasmal Media Forms - D. Fox Harrell

• Constructively Imagined

• Constructively authored

• Transformative

• Dynamically Improvisational

• Computational

• Intertextual

• Content Driven

• Socially Engaged

Donald Glover / Childish Gambino

Atlanta

This is America

• Layered Meanings / References / Symbolism

• Depends on digital distribution

"You fall into a bad place when you try to preach and be a translator to people," Glover added. "I don't think Hiro believes in translating. He believes the audience has integrity at the end of the day. He believes in a world where we're supposed to make something brand new. And that's where the magic lays."

Alynda Segarra

From NPR Feature on Rican Beach

"'Rican Beach' is a fictional place and the song is a cautionary tale," Segarra tells NPR. "It tells the story of a city progressing rapidly into militarized and segregated areas. There's a lot of symbolism in the song that reflects our times, of course…The point of view is one of resistance, people of color claiming their space and their right to exist. It is about claiming ancestry and recognizing a history of facing systemic oppression while protecting and connecting with the land.”

It is up to us to speak truth and to combat hateful propaganda with our work. I think we as a nation must face our history and learn how to talk to each other about how that history is very much present and alive in us...It is up to us to imagine a bright future: If we fall silent I fear the future that we face."

Combines elements of different musical styles, themes and content, cultures, geographies, perspectives, narratives + communities

Swet Shop Boys

Janelle / Jane Monae AKA Cindi Mayweather

“She imagines black people into the future in the midst of past and present threats of erasure.”

“The idea of envisioning a reality uncoupled from the structures that tie us to a threatening present is the power and affirmation of imagining black futures. Ytasha Womack, author of Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture describes Afrofuturism as "an intersection of black cultures as well as imagination, technology, mysticism, and liberation." For Womack, "the value in exploring these ideas is the very real understanding that it liberates us."“

Radical Imagination:

“asks us to create and interrogate images of the world that we want so that they might propel us into the future. Afrofuturism re-affirms that the imagination is a necessary tool for dismantling old structures.”

In Monáe's radical imagination, we see both the existence of these old hierarchies — the android as Other, the rule of an authoritarian regime

— and, through the stories of her narrators, a path beyond them.

And Monáe shows us that we don't need to be tied to one vision of the future. We can create worlds that help us process current hierarchies and others that try to break out of those structures.

Through this imagination, our vision of what's to come sharpens and adapts.

This idea of "practicing futures" is explored in Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by adrienne maree brown. "Imagination turns Brown bombers into terrorists and white bombers into mentally ill victims. Imagination gives us borders, gives us superiority, gives us race as an indicator of capability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone else's imagination, and I must engage my own imagination in order to break free," brown writes.