BLACK TO THE FUTURE

The BLACK TO THE FUTURE: CONFLUX is a hybrid happening built around musical tele-production. During BTTF: CONFLUX, attendees will exist together in physical and virtual space simultaneously—occupying physically disparate “zones” around the globe while joined together online.

Goals

• Produce an event with distribution as its central tenet
• Engage with and build community between Nairobi and LA’s electronic music production scenes as well as other Black creative communities around the world
• Refine and build on the work of the ARC: CONFLUX event
• Impart new technical and musical skills to participants
• Explore variations of creating in person activations for distributed music events

Picture yourself in the corner of your bedroom,  simultaneously co-creating a song or cover art with your mate in another location, be it a neighbourhood, city, or even country, happening live and entirely on the fly! That, and more, are the wonders & possibilities the Anansi Revolutionary Conflux beholds.

A Conflux is an emergent art practice that constitutes remote tele-production of art. However, through experience, one discovers a social space that fosters forward-thinking approaches to expression and co-creation in art. Though it began in music co-creation, it has since been adapted to other art forms such as visuals and writing, further proving its ability and aim to use emerging technologies to enable artists in different physical locations to create with each other.

How does it work? The Conflux employs some fundamental virtual tools such as GatherTown (a funky web-conferencing/virtual space platform) as well as online DAWs such as Bandlab or Soundation for music and Figma (an interactive design tool) for the Visual Conflux.

Picture yourself in the corner of your bedroom,  simultaneously co-creating a song or cover art with your mate in another location, be it a neighbourhood, city, or even country, happening live and entirely on the fly! That, and more, are the wonders & possibilities the Anansi Revolutionary Conflux beholds…”

The musical Conflux has developed to take multiple shapes and forms, which are now classified into the Conflux QP (Quick Play): A session where artists simultaneously (but individually) work on creating a total of 4-5 tracks per session,  Conflux Jam: The artists collectively collaborate to create one jam in a one-off live session, Confluxtape: a continuous process of co-producing songs in a round-robin format, passing each other’s productions over a couple of rounds until the end of the process where the original artists make final edits, after which a listening session/party held to listen to the finalised productions. There’s also Visual Conflux: where different visual artists ‘remix’ each others’ work, and Lyrical Conflux: aimed towards variant artists using image or phrase prompts that enable them to write lyrics for songs/music around several themes/topics.