The libraries of Timbuktu are the oldest in Africa. Google’s new Arts and Culture Foundation commissioned DJ Spooky to create a music tapestry of the complex histories of music, art, and literature coming out of this incredible region of Africa.

NYUAD’s Conference Center
March 30 through April 1, 2022
In person event

DJ Spooky will be delivering a keynote for this event. Since quantum computing is expected to revolutionize the world as we know it, we need to make sure that our hackathon participants are equipped with the necessary skills needed for QC and empower a new generation of students to use the most advanced quantum hardware. Students will utilize these acquired new QC skills for social good and make a positive impact on the future of our society, as quantum computers are capable of solving hard computational problems.

Tuesday, March 1, 2022
7pm
Free Online Event
TICKETS HERE

This roundtable discussion explores the career and work of George Clinton in relation to Afrofuturism, his artistic influence on the genre, and connection to the hip-hop motifs and Afrofuturist work of Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky. The discussion also touches on Clinton’s current success as a visual artist and how he linked his “flow” as a futuristic Funk innovator to his artistic practice. DJ Spooky discusses his work and current projects with art and education institutions in Africa.

February 17 @ 7:00pm
Kingsbury Hall
Salt Lake City, UT

Conceived as a reimagining of director D.W. Griffith’s infamously racist 1915 silent film The Birth of a Nation, DJ Spooky’s Rebirth of a Nation is a controversial and culturally significant project that examines how “…exploitation and political corruption still haunt the world to this day, but in radically different forms.” Originally commissioned in 2004 by the Lincoln Center Festival, the work has played throughout the world and continues to engage audiences in themes of civil rights and freedom, seen through the lens of DJ Spooky’s unique art of remixing.

Friday, January 28, 2022
1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

Artist Laurie Anderson joins Rail Editor-at-Large Paul D. Miller for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Charles Theonia.

In celebration of her retrospective at the Hirsshorn Museum

“I’ve always felt like I wasn’t that interested in hanging out in the music scene as much as I was interested in being around really well-read people who are into science want to talk about ideas. I like to have one foot in each world,” Paul explained when I asked how he ended up at YQI. His parents were both professors, so he’s always had a passion and natural place in academia, plus he’s a wildly well-read science fiction guy and says that very much influenced his approach to music.

Mothership: Voyage Into Afrofuturism

August 7, 2021–February 27, 2022

Afrofuturism is a lot of things. It’s the past, present, and future reimagined through a Black cultural lens. Visionary, spiritual, and generative, it is art, music, literature, and cinema that expresses a just future where Black people and Black ideas thrive. It is fantasy and science fiction that envisions the African Diaspora and Black culture as central in a technically advanced and culturally rich civilization. It is also the ordinary—now— in this very moment and the everyday pleasures that may often be seen as mundane. Afrofuturism is a strategy for Black community building.