hacking time mines

Saul William’s fan­tas­tic musi­cal fea­ture Nep­tune Frost (2022), sets the tone for the coali­tion series “Hack­ing Time Mines”. In the Afro­fu­tur­is­tic sci-fi musi­cal, the myth­i­cal encounter of a miner and the inter­sex Nep­tune sparks a hacker com­mu­ni­ty’s rebel­lion against neo-colo­nial­ism and gender restric­tions. Nep­tune Frost is a thrilling explo­ration of queer­ness, romance, col­lec­tive resis­tance and the role of the medium of music within it. Its non-linear nar­ra­tive modes, blur­ring the lines between dreams and real­i­ty, in-between the past, the present and the future, make it a vivid exam­ple of cycli­cal tem­po­ral­i­ty that is rooted in African and Afro-dias­poric cosmologies. There are many genealog­i­cal traces to Afro­fu­tur­ist vision­ary Sun Ra’s bril­liant sci-fi movie Space is the Place (1973). Space is the Place looks out­ward, beyond the earth­ly con­fines, and takes music as a vehi­cle for space travel, as well as a hacker’s device, to decode and recode the dom­i­nant scripts of real­i­ty. Sun Ra sees him­self, as an African Amer­i­can, as being left out of Euro­cen­tric his­to­ry books – as his story – and is rather inter­est­ed in mys­tery that he … read more