Techno-Vernacular Expressionism

Moving beyond the nationalist project of building a home after the transatlantic slave trade and in a time of false civil democratic integration of Black people into the modern American economic republic, Matthew Angelo Harrison’s sculptural works utilize African artifactual representation as a kind of double, an uncertified copy of himself, his family, and broader Black — and then African and African diasporic — community. In a video made for his exhibition Proto at Kunsthalle Basel, Harrison leads with the statement that this presentation of objects was about “you” the viewer, and “not about me,” the creator.¹ This immediate provocation has little to do with estranging the act of art-making from the experience of art on display. Rather, he redirects the gaze into an associative feedback loop between things and selves through a systematic observation of world-building from a material, civil engineering perspective.

Harrison approaches the craft of art-making as a machinist rather than an aesthetic technologist. As a Black artist working in the federal foundation of a Euro-American national economy of culture and value, he often forgoes the boundaries between institutional archivism and a personal exploration of what he calls “abstract ancestry.” Each sculpture presents a fossilized artifactuality considered along a timeline from production to the showroom floor. Harrison’s exhibitions retrace the material production of things as commodities, where art objects are usually displayed as expressions of authenticated rigor. The formation of his own artistic identity is demonstrated in the fashioning of metal plinths and glass cases that contain and often display wooden craft figures or significant utility paraphernalia. Taking the oft-repeated Black American mantra — “we built this country” — quite literally, Harrison envisions productions of labor-intensive artworks that construct a self within a nation (understood as a sovereign community rather than a nation state).

In 2018, Harrison, a native of Detroit, began working with machines and industrial design techniques he had become familiar with during his time working on assembly lines at the Ford Motor Company. He rethought his everyday usage of computer numerical control (CNC) cutting machines to engineer sculptures — prototypes of imagined African artifacts — with a sense of inspired futurism in line with the inventive prosumer electronic music of “techno” that had been invented in his home city by Juan Atkins.

The pre-techno band Cybotron — formed in 1980 by Atkins and Vietnam veteran Rik Davis — laid the groundwork for Atkins’ Ford Motors-inspired solo project, Model 500. Decades later, Harrison reevaluates Atkins’ metaphorical imagineering of automotive music by replicating the material process of CNC machines and 3D printers used to create cars as a means for self-manufacturing art objects. He applies the sonic fictional elements of techno to abstract art-making with consumer products manufactured for a global culture industry to create what he refers to as “prototypical possibilities.” “Being African American and being freed up from the specifics of place, I don’t have direct lineage or a pedigree that extends to Africa. That’s totally severe,” he explains. “There are some elements that come through music or dance, but it’s not really clear; it’s murky.”² Harrison’s appropriation of the semi-automated industrial technology he learned as a laborer opened up new possibilities for his craft in ways that were not immediately available to Juan Atkins when he first set out to create the sound of music and technology having a conversation with one another.

Taking inspiration from the myth-science of Drexciya — a group of “second wave” techno producers inspired by Juan Atkins and Cybotron, Harrison combines traditional African artifacts with European art design techniques as a means of referencing the aesthetic and cultural estrangement of the global art market, which the dance music industry mirrors through the international trade and consumption of techno, disembodied from its creators and community. His sculptures evoke a kind of material world-building from inside the industrial empire, while referencing mask and sculpture making in the religious traditions of the Dogon, a group of approximately eight hundred thousand people living mostly in Mali and Burkina Faso, and the Makonde, a group of over a million people living mostly in Tanzania, Mozambique, and Kenya. Harrison’s assembly-line speculative modeling of Dogon and Makonde artifacts — forms drawn from wooden masks are 3D printed into ceramic, while original wooden artifacts are embedded in resin casts decorated with CNC carving — evokes a larger theory, often dismissed as pseudo-scientific by the forces of white supremacy: that ancient Africans were able to communicate with aliens from within the Sirius star system. Sirius B, a star significant in Dogon cosmology and usually not visible from Earth, could be seen in broad daylight under specific conditions that aligned in the year 2023. Two decades before this unique vantage point would be afforded to citizens of a dying Earth, James Stinson of Drexciya foretold he would produce music that would transport listeners through “a dimensional jump hole” in Africa.

In many ways, the Drexciyan-by-way-of-Dogon mythological science of an Afrofuturist “journey home” that Harrison manufactures corresponds with Achille Mbembe’s writing on practical theoretical solutions for Black survival at the end of the economy of “the New World.” In Critique of Black Reason, Mbembe suggests that:

To build a world that we share, we must restore the humanity stolen from those who have historically been subjected to processes of abstraction and objectification. From this perspective, the concept of reparation is not only an economic project but also a process of reassembling amputated parts, repairing broken links, relaunching the forms of reciprocity without which there can be no progress for humanity.³

Twenty years after James Stinson’s death in 2002, the Berlin club and record label Tresor initiated a reissue campaign of the projects made through their original contract with him, including Drexciya’s Neptune’s Lair and Harnessed the Storm, Transllusion’s The Opening of the Cerebral Gate, and Shifted Phases’ The Cosmic Memoirs of the Late Great Rupert J. Rosinthorpe. Harrison was tasked with recreating the covers of Tresor’s existing catalogue of Stinson’s works, a commission which saw him manufacture art pieces that could be seen as artifacts of the scientifically advanced underwater civilization of the Drexciya mythology.

Harrison’s family migrated from a small town outside of Atlanta, Georgia, to Detroit’s East Side in the sixties — an opposite journey to Stinson’s move to Newman, Georgia, in the early 2000s.

I had an uncle that was really into ghettotech, so my introduction to techno was through that. Underground Resistance had a few hits that came through the cracks in the ghettotech scene, so you would hear it at parties or get-togethers, but you would never hear “The Final Frontier.”⁴

In college, his European friends would inform him of techno’s effect on the world. Harrison’s artwork grew out of a desire to model readymades that would reflect the same global universality and industrial design as techno music. He considers Detroit’s hi-tech Black music like an alloy that combines many personal perspectives on contemporary technology into a single methodology that can’t be traced to a single person, but rather to a network of contexts derived from an opaque myth-science.

There’s appreciation for Black art forms outside of the US, which mutates into a universal thing. Techno is founded in Black ideas, but it’s been mutated into a universal position, like jazz music. Any artform or sport that Black people are participating in is elevated.⁵

Mbembe explores the necessity of societal ethics of restitution and reparation as a means of reimagining the world beyond commodifiable values, allowing each living thing to be a conscious agent worthy of care:

This share of the other cannot be monopolized without consequences with regard to how we think about ourselves, justice, law, or humanity itself, or indeed the project of the universal, if that is in fact the final destination.⁶

In the essay, “Afrofuturism on Web 3.0: Vernacular Cartography and Augmented Space,” Nettrice R. Gaskins, a digital artist, academic, and advocate of S.T.E.A.M. (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) fields in underrepresented communities, describes what she calls “techno-vernacular creativity” — the woven, strategic maps and codes that can be found throughout the Black cultural continuum. For her, Afrofuturism “retells history, altering characters and/or the environment by re-using existing artifacts, themes, and concepts such as quilt-based signposts, star charts, and even the heliocentric model of the universe.”⁷ Understanding the legal implication of race as a kind of technology for navigating the cracks and fissures of the American liberal economic experiment, Gaskins imagines an augmented and layered space in which Black people can activate the very tools and language of Euro-American colonial civilization.

Where Gaskins’ application of techno-vernacular creativity centers on the reappropriation and innovation of consumer technologies for prosumer uses, science and technology studies scholar Rayvon Fouché uses the term “Black Vernacular Technological Creativity” to explore the legal implications of race as a part of the functionality of technoscientific design.

A patent is a finite legal monopoly granted by a government. In order to benefit from this exclusive right to ownership, the patentee needs to have access to the resources that can produce and distribute the intellectual property protected by the patent. In most cases, African American inventors did not possess these resources and often sold their patents to whoever would purchase them.⁸

This inevitable auctioning off of individual intellectual property both emphasizes an inherent desperation for self-sufficiency and built-in societal barriers to independence. Atkins named his locked groove and stereophonic funk sound “techno” in reference to Alvin Toffler’s concept of the unlikely “techno rebels” — such as Underground Resistance and Drexciya — against technocracy; yet, globally the music would be situated in conversation with a Eurocentric canon of electronic music, including students of Stockhausen and Conny Plank, France's INA GRM, or the British BBC Radiophonic Workshop and its folk antecedent of the hardcore continuum.⁹ Gaskins and Fouché’s understanding of techno-vernacular creativity activates the suppressed artifactual mythology of Black inventors among historical icons that rationalize the entrepreneurial success of modernity to envision and make use of an expanded Black Promethean mytho-scientific omniverse and escape to other worlds.

Gaskins applies the overlapping and interloping concepts of vernacular cartography and segmented space to Cybotron, Underground Resistance, and the myth of Drexciya, whose music, much like Marvel comics and attendant cinematic universe, creates narratives that drape over real-world locations and scenarios. In an article on the myth of Drexciya’s sonic third spaces, she traces these extended realities through Drexciya’s Research, Experimentation, Science, and Technology (R.E.S.T.) principle:

The R.E.S.T. principle provides clues to all possible environments where Drexciyans can survive, from the depths of the Atlantic, to oceanic islands, or even outer space. James Stinson talked about extraterrestrial storms hitting Earth, which may explain the themes and titles on Harnessing the Storm. These ideas are all generated from the same source, for a primary purpose that comes from within the origin mythology of the Drexciyan universe.¹⁰

Gaskins imagines Drexciya as,

the aquazone that surrounds an isolated archipelago somewhere in the Black Atlantic, with dimensional portals to Africa, North America, Europe, and beyond Earth. These oceanic islands of music technology are separated from our physical reality. Drexciya’s fictionalized frequencies exist in a dimension beyond the known, providing a passage for a dispersed people, connecting them to a homeland.¹¹

In a creative use of Harrison’s techno-vernacular, the term “ambidex” — which Harrison used as an exhibition title in 2021 — also provides a functional description for the type of mythic and scientific dualism that underpins much of his post-industrial process and products. Harrison is a thinker and a tinkerer exploring artifacts and robotics as an American pragmatic philosophy. This is much in the tradition of W.E.B. DuBois, in which intellectual knowledge and speculation can analyze and activate the material conditions that might bring about possible revolution and permanent infrastructural changes.¹² Harrison applies his speculative pragmatics here, now, in the moments before a shared geophysical event is broadcast from the depths of the Drexciyan mythos.