Black Secret Technology [6-weeks, $250 Suggested]

Instructor: harrington | Thursdays May 19-June 23 | 7:30-9:30 PM ET

A Guy Called Gerald’s 1995 album Black Secret Technology was influential in the world of drum and bass, but it also introduced a counter-narrative to dominant media technologies such as TV and radio. Black secret technology, then, might also be understood as a coded system of knowledge that streams and circulates throughout black cultural production. Analogous to alchemy, its inherent meaning is not rendered on the surface but requires procedures of decoding or distilling to capture its precise meaning.

Beginning from that idea, this class tracks back to think about how both industrial capitalism and western scientific advancement used basic technologies like language and accounting systems to describe the material world, and in doing so concretized ideas about who and what were meaningful or counted. This course, then, examines the social responsibility of science, and how forms of systematic knowledge emerging in the 19th century forged new categories of difference. We will ask questions such as: What are the moral implications of scientific reasoning? How has science encoded racial logics and how can poetics disrupt them? What role do social values play in scientific research and how does art expose and re-orient these values? What is objectivity and how can embodied objectivity liberate us from structures of domination? This course embraces interdisciplinarity by thinking across the natural sciences, technoscience, histories of quantification, and Black Studies. We will examine how the poetics of science is employed as a praxis of being in works of Moor Mother, Butch Morris “Conduction”, Katherine McKittrick, A Guy Called Gerald among others.
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If at any point up to 48 hours before your first class session you realize you will be unable to take the class, we will work with you to reallocate your funds to a future class, to another student’s scholarship, or refund it. After classes begin, we are only able to make partial refunds and adjustments.