Random (F)acts Of Flyness

Program One: A Meditation on The Afrosurreal

What might it look like for archival collage to meet musical, to meet subversive satire, to meet game show, to meet thesis, to meet deprogramming, to meet lucid dream to meet ritual? Random Acts of Flyness begins to answer this question. RAOF is a program remixing our realities beyond classification created by Terence Nance (the director and one of its editors) and produced by Jamund Washington, Ravi Nandan, Chanelle Aponte Pearson, and Tamir Muhammad. The program fluidly explores the nuances and interior worlds of contemporary Black life through visual vignettes. Acts of Flyness uses many fictions to express a bounty of beautiful truths. The show is about Black possibility and healing. Anything that inspires me is a prompt. In my interactions with the world, not enough people have seen it so I decided to teach an entire semester on it at CalArts as an experiment and call it Black Time & Black Temporalitys. The goal of the course is to have intentional time dedicated to watching Black Time experienced in a visual way and to deepen the student’s art practices using ritual as a technology.

This piece will focus on Random Acts of Flyness Program One (Program Two is its own completely different conversation). What you are reading now is not an attempt to summarize each offering but rather a close read and meditation on one concept/question per episode that gave me new language for a knowing I’ve experienced. Nothing is ever about one thing - and each of these episodes is about 12 essays on their own.

Random Acts of Flyness (RAOF) used time as an instrument as it ran for two seasons. Four years apart, Program One (P1) felt like the garden-grown ingredients that go into the soup/gumbo that is Program Two (P2). I call it soup because P2 has very particular healing properties. I find that P1 is all the excavating research done for P2 to exist. In other words, P1 is the pool they are pouring from into an endless glass the viewer is sipping. Both P1 & P2 are concerned with a world beyond the visible. A world that is seeking to manifest itself through the collective work that Random Acts and A LOT of Black creatives are doing and have done. It is one voice in the chorus of Black creative work that is looking to shift our paradigm. Despite its name, Random Acts of Flyness is quite intentional. It knows the rules of Afro-Surrealism and breaks them in every episode. And by doing so it is reshaping what’s possible. Inspiration is an invitation.

Random Acts of Flyness is one of the few programs that visually articulates and centers the Black Gaze. Black time is displayed in RAOF in many tenses and dimensions. RAOF spoke to me in a language that I could understand. It is art in plain sight, it is Hip Hop in the way that it is made primarily from source material.

Entering Episode One you are immediately dropped right into present motion as Terence is filming himself on his phone while riding a bike. The introduction to the program is abruptly interrupted by a police officer doing what police officers do, which is disrupt Black Time by threatening us with doing time behind bars. It’s interesting who can make time and who can’t. Who can take time and who can’t?

In 2016’s Love is the Message, The Message is Death, by Arthur Jafa’s offers a similar montage of images of Black life spread across the spectrum of existence. An existence filled with resistance.

Episode 1 also introduces us to Death as a character who sings cryptic lullabies about the many ways Black folks experience untimely death (Kendrick weaves a similar picture on FEAR). RAOF also recontextualizes Death as a game show with Black youth as guests on it and even shows that Black Death is so prevalent in this paradigm that Death itself is exhausted from it. How is the anxiety of living in proximity to death aging us on a cellular level?

Episode 2:

“ They are stealing our consciousness so that our own self-image is almost always performative “

-Alok Vaid-Menon

Within its myriad of meanings, RAOF uses the 2nd episode to beautifully explore the way gender performances shape self image and self esteem. From the art of the greetings (which are really just complicated brief hugs) to the catcall, to the mirror talk there is an upspoken choreography of closeness American masculinity forces us to fictionalize each interaction down to. A kind of force field that we have been socialized into. Something Alok says in the mirror caught my ears, “Gender is already dysphoric”. This feels like they are getting at the fact that none of these boxes are built for us to fully express who we are or how we feel. Gender is not fixed, it is as fluid as the ocean. I mean we are 80% water. And if change is God as Octavia Bulter says, my question is then how do we worship it?

We are all trying our best to navigate the distance between what the world says that we are, and what we know ourselves to be in our many editorations. I believe that Blackness is the living proof of freedom from gender. You can only have that as a perspective if you are outside of the game of humanity. Being seen/treated as a commodity and or object actually is a real specific social location. Katherine Mckittrick writes, “Black methodologies are knowledge systems and ways of being. In this way, the dynamism between our biological selves (our flesh, our blood, our hearts, our muscles and neurons) and the stories we tell about ourselves (about our identities and our sense of place) becomes central to how we conceptualize freedom.” The stories we’ve been sold are not the stories that we are. What stories have you stored within you?

Episode 3:

How should reparations happen?

The gamification of liberation is at play in this episode. It first unfolds as Najja’s character goes to an arcade to play a game that displays a day in the life of Black women and all the unrelenting bullshit they have to navigate. An added layer is displayed when Terence delivers a Steve Jobs-like keynote for a new app called BBHM ( Bitch Betta Have My Money). The app matches the descendants of slaves with the descendants of slave owners and immediately redistributes the resources extracted by the oppressors back to the dispossessed.

I love that there are numerous black creators who are collectively imagining not just that reparations are happening but HOW it must happen. The necessary use of technology is chef’s kiss really.

There an app for everything but our liberation isn’t there?

Episode 5:

What if Martin’s dream was actually a nightmare?

This episode feels the most like a visual essay than any other episode in the collection. It articulates the archetypal project of the white devil aka the anti-hero through the vector of the white savior film. Race is a euphemism for white supremacy. Why would there need to be a race if there wasn’t a need to invent a hierarchy that necessitates a white person? Someone on top of it all. A very dangerous fiction that cuts in deep real ways.

All television is telling something. This raises the question of in American media what are the archetypes that have the most funding? Terence names this when describing the white devil as “An archetypal character trop that depicts preternaturally genius “beige skinned” protagonists who are devoid of explicitly moral character traits. They often wrestle with a sociopathic Jungian shadow that threatens to destroy their family while simultaneously being the key to their exceptional charisma and technical genius.” From Birth of A Nation to Breaking Bad, the presence of this archetype is a part of a pathology, that reinforces dominator culture and is mainstream for a reason. A sick reason. Terence also visually displays the internal struggle that Black artists face in addressing these issues through their art while trying not to center whiteness. I’ve also heard certain intellectuals pose the need for a white studies program if only to actually begin looking at the history of genocide and settler colonialism and calling it what it is.

EPISODE 6:

“Oscillating at will between Presence and non-presence and Infinitium in a really specific way “

P1 comes to a close with vignettes addressing the endurance existing takes. How tempting is escapism really? Who are we during the chaos of knowledge? They articulate the temptation to upload your consciousness to a cloud (RAOF calls it City Drive). The offer is to release yourself from all the responsibilities of daily life and have your body work and make money while your mind/spirit are in cloud somewhere.

Escape-ism is a kind of sleep. Nihilism is the easy button. As Fariha Rosin says “I spit in the face of nihilism.”

The episode ends with a whispered (ASMR) spell that reads:

“You are entitled to 

Flaw, fuck ups, failure, finishing foolishness,

Fuckery, fixation

Felony,

fallaciousness

Philandering, fussing, biting, femininity

farts

facts

Fictions, your fill, fucked up family, your only family

fans, fanscestors

Phantasm, forbearance, and fastidious meridian responses to all of the above without, and I repeat without any harm coming to your person,

your spirit, earning potential, checking account balance, standing with Saint Peter, karmic rating, reincarnitory pecking order, status or health.

You are entitled to rest you are entitled to rest you are entitled to rest.”

It’s powerful to end a season with this kind of permission.

In his book Impossible Stories, Dr. John Murillo III writes, “I’ve devoted much to thinking, writing, and teaching about what possibilities open up when Black folk wholly submit ourselves to the vertigo of this kind of time travel, this demand to accept the total disorientation of what I described as untimeliness with the hope of unlocking ever greater and even more radically destructive creative potential. “

I’ve made a similar pact with my craft, I am fully dedicated to using the fragments as an organizing principle within the grammar I’m projecting meaning onto in order to create more fewtures that benefit more than just a few of us. This will come in many forms and I am willing to be formless to meet this calling. Anything that inspires me is a prompt, there is nothing random about it.

-d