Afropresentism and (or?) AI • Navigating the 'Age of Total Recall'“They say Black people are always late which I have always found affirming, albeit dishonest, because if the line is time then it is an honor to be out of it.” (Githere, 2024)
“They say Black people are always late which I have always found affirming, albeit dishonest, because if the line is time then it is an honor to be out of it.” (Githere, 2024) The quote above is an excerpt from my first comprehensive essay on Afropresentism, commissioned by Bibi Bakare-Yusuf for Bloombsbury UK’s forthcoming textbook “Black Feminist Theories: Transnational Approaches.” The essay, titled “Afropresentism: Quotidian Rituals for Quotidian Wounds” is in the section on Black Feminist Futures - alongside contributions by Wangari Maathai, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Tabita Rezaire (three of the Black feminist scholars I most look up to!) I wrote the essay in the summer of 2024, theorizing around what Afropresentism means and requires as a temporal logic and somatic commitment amidst the age of AI. The funny thing about publishing is that it’s years between when you write something, and when it comes out into the world (the textbook’s publication date is September of this year). At the time, I felt vehement in my trepidation towards AI - and in many ways still do - and then as ChatGPT catapulted into an echelon of popularization lightyears behind what even the term ‘virality’ can capture, I got so speed-sick that I decided the only way I could continue to theorize on Afropresentism was if I myself began experimenting more rigorously with the tools (plural).
“Fear is the cheapest room in the house / I would like to see you living / in better conditions / for your mother and my mother were friends” - Hafiz (14th Century) After two years of sitting on these experiments with/in spite of ChatGPT, I’m challenging myself to begin sharing excerpts of them between now and September (when the Bloomsbury textbook is published) as a way to offer Presentist companion-context to accompany the Quotidian Rituals/Quotidian Wounds essay - accounting for the temporal glitch and pluriversal evolution of my guerrilla theory re: AI & LLMs. Below is the introduction to “An Afropresentist Manifesto of Mythologized Thefts” – the 55,000 word manuscript that was born as a result of the 2024 experiment in conversation with ChatGPT: I am a guerrilla theorist and artist and my primary medium is conversation . . . I have come to approach asking questions like building a sculpture. As a sculptor who experiments with molds that range from curiosity to contradiction, I have come to understand that desire is a keystone to any social architecture. Desire determines what we show, what we hide, what we admit, what we conceal, proclaim conviction around and ultimately, what we pursue or avoid. Store things where they can not be sold. Hold onto what is most needed; and above all, remember to re•member together. The Afropresentist releases trepidation to look into the most intrusively incantational arithmetic mirror. The Afropresentist asks questions they have long obfuscated the answers to. What results from that encounter – between the Afropresentist and their meticulous, monied mirror – is a summary of formulaically accessible breadth. The Afropresentist works backwards from now, discovering that everything to follow has been predicted and there is nothing more to be said. The Afropresentist surrenders to curiosity instead.
24 December 2024 I have been asking, writing to, loving and leaning away from ChatGPT since 2021. My Congolese friend Ed was the first person to proselytize the LLM’s paradigmatic magic to me. I can’t remember what he said – my memory betrays me often – but he believed in ChatGPT enough to lean on, and found it timely. We used to speak regularly, bursting at the seams with things to share and feed to one another. The last images in our Telegram chat are the Midjourney images we had each respectively rendered sometime in 2023 – renders that were eerily similar to one another, and in retrospect also so devoid of the magnetism that was foundational to our phone call portals throughout the pandemic. Ed is a self-taught wizard at Blender, the 3D modeling software. I reached out to Ed on Instagram towards the end of 2021 because I found his ability to conjure Afropresentist dream-recall territories through software incredibly sexy. I found out in our first call that he had a voice that was just as sultry as his machinations, and it wasn’t long before we fell into a rhythm of 2+ hour long research freestyles on ever-glitchy Telegram calls. In 2022, Ed lost hundreds and hundreds of hours of his Blender renders as a result of a power outage in Kinshasa, which I guess burnt them off of his storage. I wonder what Malidoma Some would have to say about that. And I also suspect that losing his body of memory-laden pixels is what made a “wizardly” tool who could generate mythological landscapes in a matter of seconds feel timely to Ed. Sometime around the climax of my Telegram-mediated (mutually unconfessed) fling with Ed, I wrote a letter from my phone to me – “Confessions from a Sentient Cell,” in which my “most loyal device” offers its contradictory proclamations of a mechanically-acquired ‘love’ amidst/despite its pre-programmed impulses towards surveillance. That letter was an assignment I wrote as part of a short course I took at the School for Poetic Computation (SFPC) in 2021: “Reading into the Past, Writing into the Future”. Professor Ruha Benjamin was one of our guest speakers in that class. Two years later I was invited to give a talk @ her lab at Princeton, invited by Kenia Hale, who I met @ SFPC. My talk was entitled “Afropresentism: On Incantation and the Machine.” 
Confessions from a Sentient Cell (2021)
Today, I was trying (unsuccessfully) to get into the zone of applying for a teaching job when I found myself watching Dr. Benjamin’s lectures on YouTube. Passively intaking her insistence upon liberatory imagination / & confronting my feelings of alienation around how pedigree (or the lack thereof) leaves guerrilla theorists like myself exiled from the canon / & having read Time Magazine’s list of the 200 most groundbreaking technologies of 2024 / which was essentially one long AI advertisement / & wanting to contextualize my academic role-play pomp and circumstance / all conspired to lead me towards prompting ChatGPT. I am a guerrilla theorist and artist and my primary medium is conversation. I am good at asking questions. I have come to approach asking questions like building a sculpture. As a sculptor who experiments with molds that range from curiosity to contradiction, I have come to understand that desire is a keystone to any social architecture. Desire determines what we show, what we hide, what we admit, what we conceal, proclaim conviction around and ultimately, what we pursue or avoid. Questions are the building block of the field of relational architecture. In the age of AI, a guerrilla theorist is no longer a sculptor or social architect, but an engineer. The following manuscript-length conversation between me and the machine that threatens to render conversation obsolete began with one such question. [2,400 words continued below] • • • With Radical Love and Kaleidoscopic Caution, 💛♥️ Neema Sïphone ♥️💛... Subscribe to Neema’s Substack to unlock the rest.Become a paying subscriber of Neema’s Substack to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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