Blk as Tek | echo::system and Black Performance Technologies

This paper considers dance, ecological systems, and technology through the frame of critical race theories and histories. The authors describe an iterative, long form performance project to theorize its making and collaborative processes within a cultural context; the social construct of the "digital divide" alongside notions of Black Futurity and Afrofuturist praxis. The paper examines aspects of artwork to reveal synergies and ground embodied research through analysis of a project built between 2004-2016. Additionally, the essay tracks the activities of a multi-disciplinary collaborative team and the artists' process through creative and empirical discoveries to better understand collaboration across diverse vectors and the paired roles of ecology and technology as both signifier and function. echo::system is the engendering of alternative landscapes deeply connected to culture and the environment in a way that postulates multiple affective realities of loss, heightened agency and presence, and possibility for the unknown. The project's constructed environments move audiences near to the environment through the distances we increasingly impose and inherit. Such inherited distance can be understood as industrial and colonial, enforced and false, driven by techno-ideological characteristics of the modern era. The projects' presentation of dance and technology in a race-non-neutral performance reworks our sense and, importantly, sensorial experience of the environment and ourselves in its retooling of the technological descendants of the very mechanisms of our destruction. This paper combines a formal analysis of artistic practices, critical theory of race and technology, and inherent pressing conversations around algorithmic justice. It proposes challenging cultural logics through dance performance and art making as a provocation to others to extend and explore these concepts.