When considering the exemplars of the vernacular, not often is the sonic a legitimate domain of design. For Blackness, it has been a crucial method of imagining, visualizing, storytelling, humanizing, or making sense of the world we inhabit. The translation of the experiences within life into comprehensible sonic pleasures is a ritual across the Diaspora. From the township’s birth of Amapiano, and the project’s birth of Hip-Hop, we compose from the interstices of place the ability to embody the feeling of being Black. The everyday experience becomes a legible design element to the larger sonic materiality of inhabiting Black consciousness.

dweller has been unearthing the Black origins of electronic music and informing political discourse through provoking, and expansive expert interviews understood in the lens of Black electronica. Building knowledge of Blackness through music and materiality has been the focus of Ryan Clarke’s geological investigations into the soils, landscapes, and architectures that have shaped the sonic traditions of Black Life in Louisiana. His work speaks to an Undercommons of cultural life teeming with spirit, sound, and sediment. The geographic enclaves of Black communities, rather forced, assimilated, or indigenous, are innovative hubs of cultural materiality that inform the design of its place. Documenting these materialities can add the intangible, the unteachable, and the unseen to design practices to consider the complexities of being embodied in space. Designing from these practices can begin collecting history into a contemporary vision of a Black spatial ontology. 

This episode is dedicated to taking an expansive approach to design, one that is focused on and based on the multimedia, and multidisciplinary techniques approached by Black artists, and music organizers to create safe sonic and physical spaces for Black communities, and specifically, Black Queer communities to flourish. How can we learn from the authenticity of your work and approaches?

Full Transcript

A tonal geologist from the northern rim of the Gulf of Mexico, Ryan Christopher Clarke notices the passage of time as both a trained coastal sedimentologist and artist-researcher as an Editor and Director of Educational Programming at dweller electronics, a group dedicated towards providing afrological counterpoint within an otherwise eurologically dominant music industry. His personal works investigate local cultural objects and their metaphysical communications with their proximal geological landscape.

Knowing intimately the ways his home is at great risk of physical and social loss, he finds ways to not only document this loss quantitatively in scientific research but qualitatively with works that aim to articulate the vernacular knowledges his people share with the Mississippi River Delta and its distributaries. By interpreting the various articulations of Black music as a depositional record, he views the progression of technology and culture at-large as downstream of Black innovation in dialog with their surrounding environment under the proposition of geologizing blackness.

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Developed by the African American Design Nexus at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, The Nexus is a podcast that explores the intersection of design, identity, and practice through conversations with Black designers, writers, and educators. The Nexus is produced in conjunction with a commitment by the Frances Loeb Library to acquire and create an open-access bibliography of various media suggested by the GSD community on the intersection between race and design.

The Nexus Season 4 is hosted by Tyler White, a dual candidate in  the Masters of Urban Planning and Master of Design Studies, Narratives program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. The show is recorded and edited by Maggie Janik, and the theme music is produced by DJ Eway.

For all inquiries, please email [email protected].

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