Spaceship Earth 2.0

As part of the exhibition HOPE, Museion will present in January a two-day program of events with a focus on Afrofuturism, techno, and ideas based on “Spaceship Earth”. A curatorial tour by the co-curator DeForrest Brown, Jr., and a film screening of Sun Ra’s Space is the Place at Filmclub, Bolzano, will animate the evening of January 25. The following evening, on January 26, a music event will take place at Museion, with two live sets by the electro duo Dopplereffekt and Speaker Music (a pseudonym of DeForrest Brown, Jr.).
On January 25, the HOPE co-curator, musician, theorist and author DeForrest Brown, Jr. will give a tour through the exhibition’s second floor. His versatile Third Earth Archive provides insights into the Afrofuturist myth of the Black Atlantic and Drexciya, an underwater world built by the offspring of pregnant African women thrown overboard during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Combining digital paintings by AbuQadim Haqq, various techno album covers, alternative timelines, and a story in sound, this archive – between science and fiction – is a spatial translation of Brown’s book Assembling a Black Counter Culture (2022). In 400 pages, this work explores the links between the Black experience in industrialized labor systems and Black innovation in electronic music, Afrofuturism, and mythology. 
A key reference in the book and the godfather of all previously named forms of reimagining Black history is Sun Ra, an American jazz composer, known for his experimental music and theatrical performances. In the Science Fiction film Space is the Place, a jewel in the history of jazz, hope, and Afrofuturism, the musical prophet returns to earth after traveling through space and time for several years to liberate the Black population from oppression. The film will be screened after the guided tour at Filmclub, Bolzano, in collaboration with Filmclub and Südtirol Jazzfestival Alto Adige.
On January 26, Speaker Music (a pseudonym of DeForrest Brown, Jr.) and Dopplereffekt (To-Nhan and Rudolf Klorzeiger aka Gerald Donald, the surviving member of the techno duo Drexciya) will each play a live-set based on their latest albums: Techxodus (2023) and Neurotelepathy (2022). Brown recently stated in an interview that he had been in conversation with Donald for some time and wouldn’t make any decisions or comments on Drexciyan mythology „without having been immersed in his understanding of the science and technology of this speculative civilization and worldview.”
Speaker Music (DeForrest Brown, Jr.)
DeForrest Brown, Jr. adopts the pseudonym Speaker Music for his musical endeavors. In addition to these artistic contributions, the self-described ex-American, engages in various creative roles such as installation artist, music and media theorist, journalist and curator under his own name. He is also a representative of the «Make Techno Black Again» movement, which seeks to acknowledge and recognize the origins of house music and techno in the black working-class neighborhoods of Detroit. As an author, he has penned the comprehensive 400-page book Assembling A Black Counter Culture, while as a musician, he channels the modernist Black tradition of rhythm and soul music as an intellectual space and sound of generational trauma. His albums, released on the influential London-based electronic label Planet Mu, are prominent, politically charged phenomena that push the boundaries of experimentation. Speaker Music’s latest album Techxodus was released in September 2023.
Dopplereffekt 
After three years of experimentation in isolation, in 2022, Dopplereffekt released Neurotelepathy, an oracular narrative of cerebral entanglement and advancement. The sleek mathematical models of their 2017 album Cellular Automata have now evolved into synaptic interpretations, transferences and modifications, rejecting binary expectations to meditate on the possibilities and pitfalls of what is to come.
With their second LP and fifth release in total on Leisure System, the duo of Rudolf Klorzeiger and To-Nhan have achieved a near-telepathic capacity for collaborative thought and mechanical construction. They continue to use live appearances to present experimental trials of theoretical models, and that commitment is heard in the sizzle and swing of the percussive highlights that are programmed with a serious depth and wriggle that reflect both an extension of and return to form.
SPACE IS THE PLACE
Space Is the Place is an 85-minute Afrofuturist science fiction film made in 1972 and released in 1974. It was directed by John Coney, written by Sun Ra and Joshua Smith, and features Sun Ra and his Arkestra. A soundtrack was released on Evidence Records.
The original "Academy" aspect ratio of the film has now been carefully rescanned and converted into a digital format. The result is a visual language that was missing from previous digitized versions of the film and once again triggers a unique cinematic experience.