Black Beyond’s Warpmode is a conceptual card game and social experience created by artist Jazsalyn to stimulate conversations grounded in Black Metatheories: Afrofuturism, Afronowism, Afrovoidism, and Afropocalypse. In the game, players draw cards and respond to existential prompts to reconfigure Black social and theoretical frameworks.

The game has lent itself to a multipart series—co-presented by Onassis ONX and Pioneer Works, in partnership with Metalabel—in which Jazsalyn, the Artistic Director of Black Beyond, has curated sessions to converse with various artists who have deep insights into a focus metatheory, before inviting audience members to partake directly in Warpmode.

For the third session in this series, she and American Artist will engage the theme of Afropocalypse, using the latter artist's exhibition Shaper of God as a contextual reference.

About the Artists

Jazsalyn is an ONX member and the creator of Black Beyond's Warpmode. Through alternative media and re-indigenization, her practice considers issues regarding data loss, memory restoration, and Ancestral Intelligence. She works with ancestral archives and space data to explore game engines, new AI models, and social experiences as a form of worlding counter-futures. As a lecturer at The New School, she has built curricula on African and Diaspora rituals as speculative technology. She is the Artistic Director of the experimental curatorial project Black Beyond, where she has curated exhibitions and experiences to envision alternate realities for Blackness with Serpentine Arts Technologies, Pioneer Works, ONX Onassis, The New School and more. Afropocalypse is a new conceptual framework by Jazsalyn featured in Warpmode and a forthcoming exhibition. Afropocalypse seeks to reframe Afropessimism through the context of survival and regeneration despite multidimensional periods of apocalypse in Black and Indigenous communities.

American Artist makes thought experiments that mine the history of technology, race and knowledge production, beginning with their legal name change in 2013. Their artwork primarily takes the form of sculpture, software and video. Artist is a recipient of the 2024 Trellis Art Fund and the New York City Artadia Award. They are a grantee of Creative Capital and the Herb Alpert Award in Visual Art. They are a former resident of Smack Mellon, Red Bull Arts Detroit, Abrons Art Center, Recess, EYEBEAM, Pioneer Works and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. They have exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland and the Nam June Paik Art Center, Seoul. Their work has been featured in The New York Times, Cultured, Artforum and Art in America. Artist is on the board of the School for Poetic Computation and is a faculty at the Yale School of Art.

About Warpmode

Black Beyond’s Warpmode is a conceptual card game and social experience created by Jazsalyn to stimulate conversations grounded in Black Metatheories: Afrofuturism, Afronowism, Afrovoidism, and Afropocalypse. Through public discussions catalyzed by game-play, the Warpmode program series provokes collective re-thinkings of accepted reality. Each session is curated by Jazsalyn to include a featured artist and moderator-guide who have deep insights into the focus metatheory. Ultimately, Warpmode as a card game and program series designed to open up an expanded space for intentional, anti-hierarchical conversations through Black metatheories.

Warpmode is created by Jazsalyn, Artistic Director, Black Beyond, and available on Metalabel.com.

Black Beyond’s Warpmode Series is co-presented by Onassis ONX and Pioneer Works in partnership with Metalabel.