Feb 19 2025

Black Earth Study Club: Cosmo-Computation with Bogosi Sekhukhuni and Ezekiel Dixon-Romàn

Wed | 7PM

On the occasion of Nolan Oswald Dennis’s exhibition, overturns, SI is delighted to present the second convening of the Black Earth Study Club—a series of transdisciplinary gatherings informed by Dennis’s artistic, scientific, and philosophical ruminations on the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization.

This event contends with the ambivalent potentials of digital technology, situating contemporary techno-scientific regimes of algorithmic governance in an extended timeline of racial and colonial domination while speculating on the disruptive possibilities arising from these regimes’ encounters with Black and Indigenous cosmologies.

Scholar Ezekiel Dixon-Romàn will deliver a presentation that oscillates between cybernetics, theories of racial capitalism, and notions of haunting to elaborate his proposed frameworks of “recursive colonialism” and “cosmo-computation.”

Artist Bogosi Sekhukhuni will present a performance-lecture, “Surfaceology,” which theories what they call “hyperhistory” through an exploration of emergent spacetime physics and Michelle M. Wright’s concept of “epiphenomenal time.”

Dixon-Romàn and Sekhukhuni will have a discussion and Q&A with the audience after their respective presentations.

Please RSVP to rsvp@swissinstitute.net.

Black Earth Study Club is organized by KJ Abudu, Assistant Curator, Public Programs and Residencies.

Artist and designer Bogosi Sekhukhuni offers considerations on cultures and histories of science and technology. Sekhukhuni has shown with institutions such as Kunsthalle Bern, Fondazione Prada, New Museum, MCA Chicago, Rencontres de Bamako, and Tate Modern. Sekhukhuni was awarded the the Prix Net Art Award in 2017 by Rhizome, New York.

Ezekiel Dixon-Román is Professor of Critical Race, Media, & Educational Studies and Director of the Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Urban and Minority Education. He is also co-founder and Director of the Institute in Critical Quantitative, Computational, & Mixed Methodologies and the Critical Computation Bureau. He is the author of Inheriting Possibility: Social Reproduction & Quantification in Education (2017, University of Minnesota Press); and recipient of the 2018 Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association. He also co-guest edited “Control Societies @30: Technopolitical Forces and Ontologies of Difference” (2020, Social Text Online), and most recently “Dialogues on Recursive Colonialism, Speculative Computation, and the Techno-Social” (2021, e-flux journal). He is currently working on a book project that examines the haunting formations of the transparent subject in algorithmic governance and the potential for transformative technopolitical systems.

Image: ntu, NervousConditioner.life.001.NTU, 2017/2023. Courtesy of Kunsthalle Bern. Photo by Cedric Mussano.