itp-blog

Week 11

Inspiration

This Cornell box explores the connections between darkness, galaxies, and historical Blackprints for liberation.

Visual Inspiration

I was initially inspired by this image I saw on social media.

Angela Davis

• The prison has become a black hole into which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited.
  • [Prison] tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison.
  • “Black holes not only swallow matter, they can also eject matter.” - NASA

Healing Justice Lineages

• Learn to listen to fire. Start with the furthest fire. The fire in the stars. Look between the stars for what you need. The untraceable black of the possible.

• What does it mean to listen darkly?
• What if the justice inside of our healing is not about our abilities, not about our agency, not even about our actions? What if the capacity, choice, and movement are only stars, and behind it is the dark energy of everything.
• Journeying by night barely ahead of the torches, sometimes the healing people need to trust the dark.
• When Harriet Tubman traveled through the dark again and again on fugitive journeys away from literal plantations and the plantation economy, she had to understand light better than light understood itself.

dark energy for Harriet Tubman

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, 2022

1822

the Astronomical Society of London meets to write down what they know of stars

in eastern shore Maryland araminta screams into an unmeasurable life

1835

sap dark root of love opening out your skull praise the girl who watched the comet and knew praise the girl who tracked the north star and knew praise the girl who studied herself and knew one thing:

sky is a map

1844

expand the universe

open the wet reflective road blood bashed temporal lobe

let everything that is not love escape your skull like so much stardust

1849

and while they chart the pricks of light use night love night be night free night write night

if colonialism is a starving hunter and slavery is a splintered pencil go become untraceable

1851

if all you breathe is freedom they can’t hear you if all you take is freedom they can’t steal you if all you feel is freedom they can’t find you if all you give is freedom they can’t stop you if all you love is freedom they can’t catch you

girl you look just like freedom they can’t see you

1863

sing to the river wake the people sing to the rice fields wake the land sing to the trees the vines the moss sing to the river the people come running buildings burning in their wake like stars

1865

walk away from the broken promise walk away like you walked before walk away from the muddled battle walk on into your own front door

freedom is the people you choose the air you breathe

1896

sometimes the meeting room is a night sky you see infinite versions of the universe looking back at you in each blinking face

1910

the comet comes back around the ground has changed

1913

if you build it right if you know the trees if you make it sweet enough for your parents and big enough for your community and soon enough to live in it yourself the old folks home can be a spaceship

1922

somebody thinks they can fix the cosmos get black history down in writing fix your image keep you there somewhere the first and last astronomer laughs

2022

and laughs

Implementation

Storyboard

Godot

So far, all I’ve been able to do in Godot is…make grass! This took a long time.