It alludes to ‘blackness’ as a social/cultural/political and ‘racial’ category. It alludes also to the technologically enhanced absolute category of ‘jet-blackness’, both in terms of the total absence of light, and the ‘jet’ as an iconic object of modernity.

Core to the project is also an examination of the looming cinematic anxiety embodied in the ‘dark futurism’ of ‘Tech-noir’. This was a term first made visible in James Cameron’s 1984 film ‘The Terminator’ as the name of a club. As a cinematic genre it has gone on to recycle elements of ‘Film-Noir’, an older cinema of dark ambiguity, now re-tailored for the age of techno-anxiety.

The image of the rampaging ‘other’, embodied within the dark form of Schwarzenegger’s Cyberdyne Systems Model 101: T-800 Terminator, tearing through ‘Tech-Noir’ (a site of hedonistic modernist ‘white’ pleasure, transformed into a site of carnage) embodies the fear of infiltration, invasion and disruption at the core of many science fiction and horror texts, and this will form a key part of our enquiry here.

In 2018, we were treated to a vision of an alternative afro-cybernetic future in a space called ‘Wakanda’, fueled by ‘vibranium’ and driven by the technological genius of a young black woman called Shuri. The Utopian space of Wakanda envisioned in ‘Black Panther’ (2018) is a fiction embedded within the wider fictions of the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe)its power to envisage a futuristic black space (despite remaining an undemocratic monarchy) indicates a potentially liberating twist to the ‘dread’ embodied within the notion of a ‘Jet-Black Future’.

These ideas and others will be explored in a series of evolving creative intervention’s and texts, documented through this site.

Making Art in the Age of Anxiety, serves to chart the evolution of ideas and points of research-focus encountered during the development of the Jet-Black Futures project, specifically against the backdrop of the Global Pandemic of spring 2020. These ideas may not directly feed into the final project, but form a series of notes and reflections on surrounding debates.

The first section, Notes on a Pandemic begins to deconstruct the language and tropes of the current ‘plague’ and its progress, as a means of navigating the ‘monster metaphors’ of our current age. (to borrow Kobena Mercer’s term )

Stories from a Jet-Black Country outlines the themes and research concerns of a proposed site specific work looking at the language of racial antagonism that has emerged particularly from the area of the West Midlands known as ‘The Black Country’.

In Search of Four Horses will track the research and development for a proposed multi channel video installation that will form the central work of the exhibition. It will be based around an exploration of the myth, metaphor and symbolism of the ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’ and their re-imagining in the contemporary ‘age of anxiety’, and projection into a ‘Jet Black Future’.