Lonny Avi Brooks is Professor in Communication, Cal State University, East Bay. Co-executive producer, The Afrofuturist Podcast; co-organizer, Black Speculative Arts Movement; co-founder with Ahmed Best of the AfroRithm Futures Group; co-designer of the game Afro-Rithms From The Future. Co-founder, the Community Futures School, Museum of Children’s Arts (MOCHA). Research Affiliate at Institute For The Future & Long Now Foundation Fellow and visiting professor at the Stanford d.school. Author, “From Algorithms to AfroRithms in Afrofuturism” in Black Experience in Design: Identity, Expression & Reflection.
To date, as lead creator and co-designer of the game AfroRithms From The Future, the game has been played with the AfroRithm Futures Group (ARFG) as part of the Afrofuturism exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California Arts (2021), at the Afrofuturism festival at Carnegie Hall (2022); SUNY Buffalo’s Humanities Festival Life: In the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2022); Stanford University’s design school (dschool) (2021, 2022) and as part of the dschool’s Museum of the Future and Futures Cantina at SXSW.edu for 2022 and 2023 and as part of Ten Year Forecast at the Institute For The Future (2020); the Speculative Design initiative conference, Primer 2021; at the Berkeley Jacobs design school (2022, 2023); College of California Arts, SF (2022); at the New School, NY (2020, 2021), Portland State University’s Futures graduate program and at Tulane University, UNESCO’s Futures Literacy program, NSquare (future of global security); and with Wunderland.kitchen future of food; UC San Diego’s Design and Innovation Possibility Mavric Lab; with Google’s Cloud team and Google’s Black@Search group; and most recently at the Youth Futures Summit with the California 100 Commission (2023). AfroRithms From The Future is an ongoing and integral part of the curriculum of the Community Futures school@MOCHA.
Dr. Brooks currently is co-editor with Tobias van Veen and Reynaldo Anderson of the Afrofuturist Studies and Speculative Arts book series with Lexington Press. Working with the Origami Air World Network and the Arthur C. Clarke Center for the Human Imagination’s metaFutures series, Dr. Brooks and his AfroRithm Futures Group produced the Arrival of the Mothership game series as a quest for the undiscovered stories of Africana and Indigenous ancestral intelligence to introduce their Air AfroRithm ship in virtual reality (VR) as a vibrant hub for Afrofuturism establishing our presence in the metaverse or what we like to call the Pluriverse to celebrate Juneteenth (2022). With the support of the creative research foundation Fathomers and Origami Air Co., we are developing the Astro-Equalitarian Virtual Nation, a safe space for Africana and Indigenous Diasporans in the virtual reality pluriverse. We are on a quest to make the abolition of prisons and reparations real as we create quests to prototype and celebrate them in extended and embodied realities.