Jazsalyn: Warpmode, This is not a game!

Jazsalyn’s Warpmode, This is not a game! is a digital extension of the worldbuilding toolkit Warpmode, which she produced with the experimental curatorial project Black Beyond and published through Metalabel in 2024. Taking the form of forty prompt-based player cards, the original physical kit invites people to contemplate multidimensional layers of Blackness. It explores four Black Metatheories—Afrofuturism, Afronowism, Afrovoidism, and Afropocalypse—that propose using recovered histories and knowledge systems to imagine renewal and possible futures. The digital expansion broadens the original toolkit by placing it in the context of Ancestral Intelligence, which Jazsalyn defines as the earliest knowledge systems, philosophies, and traditions passed down through generations within Indigenous and diasporic communities. Warpmode, This is not a game! uses this intelligence as a framework for an alternative form of AI, one that is rooted in the human experience of learning and developing skills and rituals.

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