By Maxwell Wilkens
Black bodies have been historically exploited to shape the terrain for capitalist plots, says Jeremy Kamal, a landscape architecture and Black culture scholar. But he seeks to reframe this narrative through his art by creating fictional, futuristic environments using media technology.
Jeremy Kamal, landscape architecture and Black culture scholar, showed a UC Santa Barbara audience three digital landscape artworks, each reflecting parts of Black identity.
“My objective as an artist – straddled between the realms of Black culture, Blackness, architecture, and landscape architecture – is to demystify the fiction that Black culture, life, and movement are experienced separate from ecology,” Kamal told a UC Santa Barbara audience. “Often when we talk about Blackness, the conversation orbits around political systems and social systems, but never around natural ones.”
Kamal, who teaches at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), showed three fictional landscapes reflecting Black identity, each a part of a futuristic world he called Mojo. He realized his landscapes with a variety of digital mediums, including CGI short films, virtual paintings, and photo collages. The event was part of seminar series hosted by the Media Arts and Technology (MAT) program, and was moderated by department lecturer Karl Yerkes.
In the world of Mojo, “the norms and benign behaviors of today are powerful forces that shape the landscapes and environments of tomorrow,” he said. “Rituals as unassuming as going to a cookout or producing music become drivers of vast ecological change and terrain manipulation.”
Kamal titled the first landscape “Da Floods,” and he created a CGI short film to explore it. Kamal said he was inspired to design this landscape after asking himself, “What if 2 Chainz or A$AP Rocky were to design a landscape?”
This fictional environment creates a flooded plain covered in fountains, and when trap composers come to the environment to produce music, the water in the fountains vibrates with the sound. Drones fly over this landscape and plant seeds in the ground. The overflow from the fountains waters the soil so that louder sounds create denser fauna.
In this landscape, Black culture directly creates a new habitat. “With every beat, comes a new environment, and a new ecology,” Kamal said.
The second environmental concept Kamal discussed is called “Da Blades.” It forms an enormous grassland where people come to have cookouts, and where giant 3D printers create shaped mirrors which enhance the acoustics of the environment.
Kamal said that connecting the different environments was a very important goal for him. “Music created in ‘Da Floods’ serves as backdrops to uncles cooking on the grill, dominoes being slapped, card games being played, and Cha-Cha Slides,” he said.
Kamal titled his last landscape “Da Fringes,” and he is currently working on a CGI short film to realize it. In this ecology, Bloods and Crips – rival gangs in modern Los Angeles – plant red or blue flowers across a vast environment and try to control more territory with their colors.
In Kamal’s fictional landscape “Da Floods,” trap music artists use enormous cranes and sound boards to produce music, while basins full of water vibrate with the sounds of their work.
“A reason why I took the topic of gang culture is because I particularly did not want to stray away from all aspects of what we deal with in Black life,” Kamal said. “There are opportunities to redefine and reframe these things in a new context, that can take them out of these narratives that we see them through today, and look at them as opportunities for the future.”
Gangs were originally formed because Black people were not allowed to be Boy Scouts, and wanted to make their own version of it, Kamal said. “Da Fringes” connects to this origin story, providing an ecology where these original intentions lead to a different outcome.
Kamal said he wants to finish this collection of projects by weaving a single narrative through them. “The final piece that I have planned out for years down the road will go on a road trip, where we actually get to see the adjacencies between these landscapes, as a father takes his daughter on a road trip and starts to explain it to her,” he said.
Kamal finished his talk by describing something he called “meanwhile moments.” In history classes, he used to wonder what Black people were doing during important events. While 18th-century British citizens were creating a culture of teatime and leisure, Black people were cultivating the sugar that went into their drinks. While white Americans were creating a road trip culture in the ‘50s, Black people were forced to use a “Green Book,” which listed limited locations where Black people could safely stay and get food.
“So, you had this top narrative that’s entrenched in ideas of leisure and privilege, and then you have this bottom narrative that is entrenched in ideas of labor and apprehension,” Kamal said. “Projects like Mojo seek to reverse this whole idea.”
Maxwell Wilkens is a third-year UC Santa Barbara student majoring in Communication and Music Studies. He is a Web and Social Media Intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.