Developed out of 2020–2022 VLC Fellow Rasheedah Phillips’s ongoing practice as a member of Black Quantum Futurism, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School presents Time Zone Protocols (April 4–18, 2022), the Prime Meridian Unconference (April 15–17, 2022), and the digital project www.timezoneprotocols.space.

The exhibition and the accompanying Unconference, both held at the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery at Parsons School of Design, explore the implications of the 1884 International Meridian Conference (IMC), a convening that established a prime meridian, enforcing a universal time standard. Tracing the “Protocols of the Proceedings,” the written and unwritten political agendas and social agreements that underlie Westernized time constructs, Phillips examines the protocols by which dominant time structures regulate, catalyze, and perpetuate systems of oppression that deny marginalized people access to and agency over the temporal domains of the past and present, with a focus on Black communities in the US. Using Black Quantum Futurism and Colored People’s Time as ontological frameworks, the exhibition, Unconference, and accompanying digital space www.timezoneprotocols.space propose alternative theories of temporal-spatial consciousness.

The three-day, hybrid Prime Meridian Unconference brings together artists, architects, musicians, physicists, geographers, technologists, and scholars of African American Studies. Through interactive talks, workshops, panels, performances, and plenary sessions, the participants consider new ways of understanding our relationship to space-time, utilizing specific Black social, geographical, and cultural frameworks that seek to unmap Black temporalities from the Greenwich Mean timeline. Together they explore and unpack the standards and protocols of time that have left and continue to leave Black people locked out of the past and future—stuck in a narrow temporal present. Speakers and presenters include Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother), Asia Dorsey, Walter Greason, Joy tabernacle-KMT, Kendra Krueger, Ingrid LaFleur, V. Mitch McEwen, Katherine McKittrick, Danielle M. Purifoy, Ingrid Raphaël, Thomas Stanley, Ujijji Davis Williams, and Celeste Winston. The Unconference produces alternative principles that relate to the possibilities of reshaping, remapping, dismantling, and creating new time zones, or protocols of time. By enabling Black communities with the agency to survive, thrive, and access their futures and pasts, the Unconference and Time Zone Protocols propose more expansive, healthier presents. 

In the two months leading up to the exhibition and Unconference, Phillips convened a group of Time Zone Protocols Surveyors—individuals who met to examine and discuss TZP research materials, including an archive of readings, images, sounds, and videos on time zones, time, temporality, prime meridians, and temporal oppression as experienced by Black communities. The Surveyors attend and contribute to the Unconference, collectively developing protocols, resolutions, temporal tools, time zones, and markers. These principles and new protocols are compiled and shared, with attendees taking the principles back to their communities with a commitment to working toward upholding them and creating liberated futures, new space-times, and environments where these shared principles can be utilized and honored.

FRIDAY APRIL 15
Kellen Auditorium
66 5th Ave, New York, NY 10011

6:30–7:00 pm
Undesigning Systemic Time For Temporal Liberation And Reparations
Prime Meridian Unconference Opening Lecture
Rasheedah Phillips
Systemic time is typically mapped as objective time onto clocks, watches, and other artifacts of mechanical clock time, synchronized to a master time that lives at the Greenwich Prime Meridian. The talk will consider Western linear clock time as a chrono-oppressive system of surveillance, labor regulation, objectification, and punishment for marginalized black communities specifically, and the temporal technologies Black people have developed to subvert, re-envision, reclaim, redesign, undesign, and dismantle the material realities of clock time and culture in their lives and communities.

7:00–7:15pm
Reticulation.1993.2019.
Screening
Katherine McKittrick
With the plantation as a backdrop, a set of instructions provided by Édouard Glissant, and a black sense of place looming, this time-map considers how coloniality—that grim telos that hinges on race-thinking— provides the conditions for reinventing where we are temporally.

7:15–8:00 pm
The Sun
Mendi + Keith Obadike
In this workshop, we will screen a sound film of ours entitled “The Sun,” followed by a discussion about altered states of consciousness and how our perceptions of time are shaped by the practice of listening.

SATURDAY, APRIL 16
Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery
66 Fifth Avenue at 13th Street, New York City

10:30–11:00am
Opening Plenary & Welcome
Rasheedah Phillips

✺ Lightwave Track

11:00am–12:15 pm
Dead Line?: On Slowing Down in Black “Space-time”
Danielle Purifoy
Through four scenes in the U.S. South and Midwest in the 1990s-2010s, this session seeks the idea of Black “space-time” as both a break in the lineage of plantation time and as a committed practice of sustaining relationships to people, to land, and to liveable futures. We engage a number of scholars and practitioners of Black “livingness,” including Katherine McKittrick, Fannie Lou Hamer, Jaki Shelton Green, JT Roane, Octavia Butler, and Clyde Woods. We also travel to a few living U.S. Black places in Soul City, NC, Institute, WV, Pullman, MI, and Lowndes County, AL.

✺Photon Track

11:30am–12:45 pm
Bending Space-time with Botanicals
Asia Dorsey
Plant like humans are unknowable. And yet, the process of inquiry and being inquired about is what gives shape and contour to all existence. Plant personhood like human personhood cannot be contained. These personhoods have a way of leaking upon engagement. Causing the perceiver and the perceived to become different and bend in new ways as a byproduct of those moments of belonging. One of the unexplored ways of using plants is through allowing them to change our perceptions of relationships and in this, change our perception of space-time. This somatic session combines social meditative technologies along with common, safe, and powerful nervine plants to demonstrate our ability to shape time as a relational practice.

12:45–1:00 pm
Break: Transition Time

✺Lightwave Track

1:00–2:15 pm
Cloud Time
V. Mitch McEwen
This session, in dialogue with climate scientist Nadir Jeevanjee, will explore the possibility of experiencing simultaneity via temperature. V. Mitch McEwen is an architectural designer. She teaches at Princeton School of Architecture, where she directs the architecture and technology research group Black Box, exploring mixed human-robotic processes in design and construction.

✺Photon Track

1:30–2:45 pm
Occupying Vacancy: Looking at Detroit’s Grassroot Activation of Vacant Land and Structures
Ujijji Davis Williams
Detroit’s recent identity as the ‘comeback’ city should be largely attributed to the local effort and investment of Detroit residents who have been living with extreme land vacancy. After a long period of disinvestment and into a recent (rather rapid) moment of reinvestment, many Detroiters are focusing on repairing their history of loss through neighborhood-based and locally serving green spaces that reflect historic values and future aspirations. In this session, we will explore some examples on how Detroiters are threading the past into the future through present spaces.

2:45–2:55 pm
Prentice’s Joy
Andrea Roberts
I drove from US 190 from Austin to Jasper & Newton Counties to document historic African American communities known as freedom colonies, Black Pockets, or freedmen’s settlements 2014-17. While driving toward my study sites or visiting grassroots preservationists, I’d take in the way the landscape transformed along the way. By the time I reached Tyler County, I’d passed a row of wooden buildings facing the highway. I’d catch glimpses of the owners, elderly Black men, and women riding lawn mowers who’d occasionally wave back to me. I’d driven behind the property, down a road to Moss Hill freedom colony’s church and cemetery. Whenever I asked residents in the region about the houses, people would call them slave cabins. At a festival held in Shankleville Community, I met a local historical commission member who knew someone who lived on the 9 acres where these houses were located. The resident’s name was Prentice Barlow. Prentice was 47 years old and lived there alone. He led us on a tour during a hot July day of what were actually tourist cabins–vacation homes for travelers. This was a respite, a cafe, a set of tourist cabins where African Americans could safely sleep and eat while traveling between Texas and Louisiana in the 1930s-1960s. walked us around the property and inside the cabins. He Prentice called me Shug and seemed to live in some other time of perpetual joy and delight in his own world. For more stories, memories, and glimpses of life in free Black space, visit https://www.thetexasfreedomcoloniesproject.com/atlas . Select the Visual History tab for images and stories crowdsourced from the public.

2:45–3:15 pm
Break: Transition Time

✺Lightwave Track

3:15–4:30 pm
Timecasting with Entropy & Lasers
Kendra Krueger
Timecasting is an Intuitive technology based on both ancestral and modern technologies.
It is a process of ritual and resonance that allows one to navigate timespace in order to find and elevate or expand one’s experience through portals of resonance. These resonant timespace portals can be generated or discovered by understanding the dynamics of entropy(chaos) and laser/masers(coherent amplification) along with tracking personal systems, patterns and collecting biometric and environmental data. This workshop will guide participants through the philosophy of these dynamics, share some Timecasting techniques along with a scientific process of creating your own through inquiry, discernment and liberation. These technologies work with emotional, physical and mental energy. They can in fact transform, transmit, store and receive information, matter and energy, just as any modern-day technology, however, with the intentional ability to heal and expand the possibilities of our reality.

✺Photon Track

3:45–5:00 pm
Epochs, Ages, and Yugas: Macro-Temporal Texture and the Expiration of White Power
Thomas Stanley
If, as Dr. Stanley suggests, Alter Destiny is the new AD—the next major demarcation in planetary time, what is this Alter Destiny, exactly, and what is our most healthy relationship to this temporal phase shift? Additionally, what tools, weapons, and strategies can we deploy to increase the likelihood that the advancing timewave delivers us to a better place, a place more suitable for the wellbeing of children and trees.

5:00–5:15 pm
Break: Transition Time

5:15–5:45 pm
Protocols / Day 1 Review (Plenary)

SUNDAY, APRIL 17
Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery
66 Fifth Avenue at 13th Street, New York City

10:45–11:00am
Opening Check-in
Rasheedah Phillips

✺Lightwave Track

11:00–12:15 pm
CHRONOMORPHISM: A Conversation on the Black Speculative Science of Time Travel with Dwayne McDuffie
Walter D. Greason
Black speculative design has existed for more than 10,000 years. Modern awareness of these techniques emerged from the musical forms of jazz and hip hop before taking shape in a graphic arts revolution at the end of the twentieth century. Dwayne McDuffie’s work in Milestone Media transformed the imaginary landscapes of print and visual media through programming like the DC Animated Universe, Marvel Comics’ Black Panther, and hundreds of independent expressions like the Black Age of Comics. In 2010, McDuffie explored the concept of ‘chronomorphism’ in the context of the Milestone “Shadow Cabinet” comics. This hermeneutic informed a public sense of genealogy, ancestry, and lineage that defined a new generation of Black Speculative work, often called “Afrofuturism.” Found in Erykah Badu’s song “Next Lifetime” and KRS-One’s lyrics “Aw Yeah,” chronomorphism explains a transcendent sense of atemporal power that continues to define new art in work like HBO’s Lovecraft Country and New Line Cinema’s “Matrix Resurrections.” This session will provide a detailed analysis of the science of chronomorphism as it emerged in discussions with Dwayne McDuffie and other Black Speculative creators.

✺Photon Track

11:30am–12:45 pm
Grief Reparations and Temporal Hush Harbors
Joy tabernacle-KMT
Dominant white pathology steals time, increasing the lifespan of the white mainstream through antagonism of Black beings, which creates cascading effects of shortened lifespan. One direct attack and antagonism of Black time is the theft of Black Grief time. In this workshop, we will relieve Black folks of some weight/ dead time that we carry in the cells of our body through the construction of demarcated temporal Hush Harbors.

12:45–1:00pm
Break: Transition Time

✺Lightwave Track

1:00am–2:15 pm
Black Fugitive Infrastructures and Cross-time Space Routines
Celeste Winston
This session explores fugitive infrastructure as a foundation for Black freedom struggles across time. Infrastructures, generally defined, are material systems that organize and sustain everyday life. “Fugitive infrastructures” encompass material arrangements produced through cumulative efforts by everyday people to organize and sustain life when possibilities for survival seem foreclosed (Cowen 2017). Whereas infrastructure signifies permanence and rootedness in place, fugitivity implies that which is in flight, fleeting, transitory, or temporary. The seemingly impossible overlay of these multiple characteristics invites a consideration of what it means to produce a material, grounded basis for fugitivity over time. We will center the ongoing history of marronage and resistance to policing in one place in Maryland to outline a protocol for locating the capacity of Black flight to produce longstanding, generational infrastructures that disrupt dominant power structures and relations.
Suggested readings:
Winston, Celeste. “Maroon geographies.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 111, no. 7 (2021): 2185-2199.
Hawthorn & the Cowen, Deborah. “Infrastructures of Empire and Resistance.” (2017)

✺Photon Track

1:30–2:45 pm
The Future of Time: The Metaverse and Black Health
Ingrid LaFleur
When Black bodies were forced across time zones during the trans-Atlantic slave trade, did a time sickness occur that we have yet to identify? Afrofuture theorist Ingrid LaFleur invites attendees to join her for a co-creation session to investigate how healing could occur through the implementation of new time systems. Black life has been fraught with health issues such as high blood pressure, fibroids, and more. Could a multi-temporal approach to work/life create pleasurable and efficient ways of maintaining Black health and improving our overall quality of life? If so, what are the time systems that need to be incorporated? Will we be able to apply these systems within the metaverse? Attendees will work through this inquiry together with LaFleur to explore the future possibilities of multi-temporal living.

2:45–2:55 pm
Prentice’s Joy
Andrea Roberts

2:45–3:15pm
Break: Transition Time

✺Lightwave Track

3:15–4:30pm
Malleable Futures
Ingrid Raphaël
Welcome to Malleable Futures: a location and orientation that imagines and interprets time through collective-manifesto making, ritual setting, journal prompts, and performance. Using research of cities & history as a structure, body-movement as a vessel, plant growth and hair braiding as a guide, music & sound as time annotation, participants of Malleable Futures will connect the dots between those findings and their experiences of time to ground in a limitless past-present-future

What happens when we embody time as malleable ? What does (y)our measure of time look or feel like? Where does time betray you? How can it show up for you/us? These are some of the questions Malleable Futures will explore and unearth to provide actual tools we can use when you exit Malleable Futures.

Come prepared to experience the world of Malleable Futures where journaling, reflection, ideas of time are all possible | bring a friend.

✺Photon Track

3:45–5:00pm
Land, Entangled Space, and Time
Camae Ayewa
Investigating the unknown using our senses and meditation to uncover buried histories and hidden past and future memories. Everything is alive. We will deepen our sensitivity and become in tune with so-called inanimate matter. We will learn to identify different temporalities in a multitude of spaces and places, in order to learn to tap into the temporalities of the Black Time Belt.

5:00–5:30pm
Closing/Debrief Protocols, Commitments, next steps

In the two months leading up to the exhibition and Unconference, Phillips convened a group of Time Zone Protocols Surveyors—individuals who together met to examine and discuss TZP research materials, which includes an archive of readings, images, sounds, and videos on time zones, time, temporality, prime meridians, and temporal oppression as experienced by Black communities. The Surveyors, selected through a call for applications, attend and contribute to the Unconference, collectively developing protocols, resolutions, temporal tools, time zones, and markers. These principles and new protocols are compiled and shared, with attendees taking the principles back to their communities with a commitment to working toward upholding them and creating liberated futures, new space-times, and environments where these shared principles can be utilized and honored.

The Unconference will be livestreamed on the www.timezoneprotocols.space and the Vera List Center’s website. In-person attendance is limited.