Special Section

Natural Metaphors for Network Gathering: Technologies of Meeting at the Allied Media Conference

Veronica Paredes

University of California, Los Angeles
vaparedes@ucla.edu

Abstract

In this article, I explore how nature metaphors are used within communities related to the Allied Media Conference (AMC) in Detroit. The AMC celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 2018, and took place annually in Detroit for twelve years leading up to that milestone (Allied Media Projects 2022b). Beyond AMC’s commitment to Detroit, the conference offers a compelling set of case studies for considering dialogue between intentional praxis of gathering and important issues related to environmental racism, popular education, and science fiction. AMC is designed to explore methods of building and sustaining within media-based organizing, while the conference itself models practices of building and sustaining within its own network. Primarily focused on adrienne maree brown’s book Emergent Strategy (2017) and the mobile multimodal art installation Beware of the Dandelions (2015–2016) from the collective Complex Movements, this paper argues that AMC uniquely weaves components together that create the conditions for studying organizational process through understandings of the natural world.

Keywords

media-based organizing, adrienne maree brown, Complex Movements, nature metaphors, mycelium, dandelions

Preface

One Friday evening in June 2017, I found my way to the opening ceremony of the Allied Media Conference (AMC) in Detroit.¹ Upon entering the packed Detroit Film Theatre before showtime, I could feel excitement and a sense of celebration radiating from the crowd as conference attendees filled up the auditorium’s 1,150 seats.² The ornate theater’s luxuriousness added to the pleasure of the event. Keeping with the Beaux-Arts style of the Detroit Institute of the Arts building (Detroit Institute of Arts 2022), the space provided a welcome contrast from the institutional settings typical of most conferences. Admittedly, most AMC sessions took place in Wayne State University classrooms, but not Friday night. Opening night belonged in a grand venue.

The ceremony provided “an inspiring mix of conversations, performances, and visual art” (Ignaczak 2018). Musician Tunde Olaniran produced the show for a second year, while adrienne maree brown and Leah Vernon co-hosted. The program featured appearances from AMC administrators Jeanette Lee and Morgan Willis, Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza, writer and professor Scott Kurashige, and musician Mona Haydar (“Hijabi”) along with dance group Al Ta’wam. Creative media and music collective The Aadizookaan (ADZKN) concluded the event with a riveting performance.

ADZKN’s closing act vividly stands out in my memory of the event. ADZKN member Giizhigad/Christy B. (Anishinaabe) graced the stage first. She offered a blessing while sitting on the stage floor before being joined by Sacramento Knoxx (Ojiwbe/Anishinaabe and Xicano). Further collaborators appeared as the group began to perform a song called “Nakweshkodaadiidaa Ekoobiiyag [Let’s Meet Up by the Water]” (Knoxx 2016a).³ The song itself gathers diverse sonic components: poetry from Detroit activist Monica Lewis Patrick about Detroit corruption; Giizhigad’s bilingual singing in Anishinaabe and English for its chorus; and rap verses from Knoxx and Kaz Clever. A beat created using sacred Anishinaabe elements, the rattle (to represent water) and drum (to recall heartbeat), undergirds the whole composition (Knoxx 2016b).

After the ceremony, I left the auditorium buzzing with anticipation for the programming to come that weekend. I wanted more, something like an encore. The desire was familiar for attending concerts, but not conferences. Reflecting on ADZKN’s performance I recognize now how it managed to inspire my resonance with the song. “Let’s Meet Up by the Water” explicitly considers environmental racism, local, institutional, and global corruption. Subtly, it also explores political methods of convening both discussed and practiced at the AMC over many years. I only grasped the process-oriented element of the musical collaboration when writing this article, even though I now see it right there in the song’s title. The AMC conference entails meeting at a specific location (Detroit) at a particular time (June or July). ADZKN’s instruction to “meet up by the water” echoes AMC’s biennial invitation to convene in Detroit. Furthermore, the AMC is no ordinary conference; it represents the life-sustaining rivers, lakes, oceans, and channels ADZKN evokes in their song. For its participants, AMC is the water. Like the togetherness ADZKN calls for, the act of gathering is paramount for the AMC. The practice of gathering is reflected upon at the conference itself. AMC is designed to explore methods of building and sustaining within media-based organizing, and the conference models practices of building and sustaining within its own network.⁴

In its current mission statement, Allied Media Projects, AMC’s umbrella organization, identifies itself as a collective shaping the future: “We are a network of people and projects, rooted in Detroit and connected to hundreds of other places across the globe. Together, we grow and exchange ways of using media to create the world we need” (Allied Media Projects 2022a). The ambitious goals for the now-biennial conference focus on the need to “cultivate media strategies for a more just, creative and collaborative world.”⁵ Doing this work requires that the organization creatively imagine conditions not as they exist in the world now but as they may in possible futures built together. AMC creates opportunities to enjoy worlds otherwise with one another, in community. Over the past five years, I have experienced the AMC’s powerful effect firsthand—at Cass Café, MASH Detroit, the Marble Bar, the Detroit Film Theatre, the David Whitney Building, and Wayne State University’s campus. I have known about AMC’s brilliance since 2010, but did not attend my first AMC until 2016. While I regret not traveling to Detroit City sooner, I am grateful to know it through the AMC.

I write this article to express, and better understand, my gratitude for the AMC and its dedicated scholars, activists, musicians, designers, organizers, facilitators, and media-makers. In getting to know the AMC, I became interested in how participants return year after year to collectively imagine liberation. My own participation in the conference includes the role of network gathering coordinator, which builds from my prior experience as a network facilitator for a feminist networked collective (I describe this organization in further detail later in the article). Specifically focused on network gathering and facilitation, I was impressed by the conference’s successes in maintaining enthusiasm from its participants. Additionally, while many attendees returned annually, first-time visitors frequently participate each conference year.

How had AMC achieved this level of trust with loyal, returning participants, while also considering new attendees and meeting their distinct needs? Having faced similar challenges as a coordinator, on a much smaller scale, I was curious how conference organizers managed to cultivate feelings of joy, celebration, and creativity amongst such disparate groups. Certain elements stood out to me: (1) how AMC approached the duty of making its programming accessible; (2) the different levels of relation that AMC engaged with a sense of radical hospitality; and (3) how metaphors from nature recurred in the rhetoric and creative work of diverse projects connected to AMC. In this article, I argue that AMC weaves these components together, creating conditions for intentional praxes of gathering. While rituals of gathering and meeting are studied in fields like organizational behavior, and discussed for clarification in community-based participatory research and facilitation work, guidelines for gathering remain opaque in most other domains. Collaborating with AMC encouraged me to think through how the very shape of gathering and meeting can be designed by its participants, but not simply in prioritizing one topic for discussion over another and rearranging the agenda. How a group meets and gathers warrants deliberation. It also holds influence over who comprises the group in subtle but important ways.

Learning from AMC’s reflexive facilitation approaches has helped me to figure out how to detect and describe the tacit assumptions at play in meeting and gathering. Unexpectedly, these lessons were communicated in modes as diverse as very practical instructions for how different people might navigate the conference to expressive, poetic language evoking nature metaphors. To the first mode, the AMC defines accessibility as more than “a concept—it is an investment and an action” (Allied Media Projects 2016, 27). A section in the conference program titled “Resources” includes information about childcare, translation, and a wheelchair accessible van. For AMC, accessibility “means the opportunity for every participant to be able to engage with the spaces, places and events of the weekend” (Allied Media Projects 2016, 27). The third mode of using nature metaphors is explored in great length in the sections that follow.

I focus in this article on metaphorical concepts used within AMC’s communities that emphasize process, primarily mycelium—to represent interconnectedness—and dandelions—associated with decentralization and regeneration. To start, I consider how the widespread appearance of the natural world in our everyday visual and semiotic encounters with commercial personal computing differs from what I interpret AMC’s intentions in using nature metaphors. The introduction also describes in further detail the case studies from AMC’s collaborators that I focus on here—works from adrienne maree brown and the collective Complex Movements—and provides some context for their influences as well as my own in writing this analysis. This setting up is intended to situate brown’s books, Complex Movement’s multimodal project Beware of the Dandelions, as well as my own perspective.

Introduction

Contemporary technology users regularly come across references to animals, plants, and locations known for their scenic beauty. The operating system that runs in the background while I write this is called macOS Monterey. It is named after a city on the California central coast known for being home to one of the country’s largest aquariums (Koronka 2021). Since the release of Mavericks in 2013, Apple has named its operating systems after locations in the region, after having named them for animals since 2000. A streak of big cat names ended in 2012 with Mountain Lion (Haslam 2021). Even if you are not a Mac user, you are likely to find on both PCs and Macs scenic locations that spotlight the natural world in the forms of screensaver or default computer wallpaper options. One of the most well-known default desktop wallpapers is the “Bliss” theme from Microsoft Windows XP. The image features rolling green hills shaded by fluffy white clouds that grace an otherwise clear blue sky; rugged mountains can also be glimpsed in the background. The image is a photograph that was shot in Sonoma, California (Grant 2021; Messieh 2013). These appearances of (big) cats and serene landscapes, along with countless other examples, have become symbolic of personal computing and networked belonging. They are the flora and fauna of the “techno-ecological imagination” (Pringle 2021). In her book Virtual Menageries, Jody Berland starts from similar observations about the pervasive, but superficial, inclusion of nature in emergent technologies in order to historicize how “groups of animals resembling menageries came to launch the tools and platforms of digital culture” (2019, 1).

Contrasted with the ubiquity of animals as pets or as part of a menagerie in mainstream digital culture, AMC does not focus on cats, big or domestic. Instead AMC stresses relation. During another AMC opening ceremony in June 2018, Jeanette Lee described a podcast project she had recently co-hosted with colleague and opening ceremony co-presenter Morgan Willis. The series was called “Critical Connections: Stories from 20 years of the Allied Media Conference.” Lee and Willis (then executive director and associate director of Allied Media Projects, respectively) collected interviews with some of the many people who had been involved with AMC throughout its two decades of existence. Lee said of the podcast that they “found that the only way to tell that story [of the conference’s twenty-year history] was to tell an amalgamation of stories because the AMC is not a single organism. It is a forest, it is an underground network of mushrooms, it is a galaxy — and we have no end of metaphors. But the best one is probably that it is fertile ground” (Allied Media Projects 2018). In Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (2017)—a book I explore at length in this article—adrienne maree brown paraphrases Lee, describing how “the role of organizers in an ecosystem is to be earthworms, processing and aerating soil, making fertile ground out of the nutrients of sunlight, water, and everything that dies, to nurture the next cycle of life” (brown 2017, 116).

While Lee’s use of metaphor is of key interest in this article, her frequent mention of AMC as fertile ground is especially relevant to my own experiences with the conference. In the same year I attended my first AMC, a networked collective that I had actively been involved with for the prior three years held its last major conference.⁶ Coined FemTechNet (short for Feminist Technology Network) by co-founders Anne Balsamo and Alexandra Juhasz, the collective designed and coordinated a large-scale distributed open collaborative course (DOCC) on the topic of feminism and technology during the 2013 academic year. Beyond the course topic, FemTechNet’s course form was innovative. It was a feminist response to the massive open online course (MOOC), which was representative of education technology at the time that made lofty promises to transform the modern university. FemTechNet challenged the MOOC’s top-down model of pedagogy by engaging in online learning while “guided by long-standing feminist principles and processes” (Juhasz and Balsamo 2012). After a successful run of the course, the collective continued to iterate on the collaborative DOCC form with the topic of “feminism and technology” for many years. The group held annual summer workshops from 2013 to 2015, culminating in a summer workshop funded by Yale University, alongside the International Alliance of Research Universities.⁷

By this point in the network’s story, next steps were uncertain and though I would be part of a group representing FemTechNet (hereafter FTN) at AMC network gatherings in 2016 and 2017, we were mostly “FemTechNet” in name only. By 2017 the collective I remain a member of, Situated Critical Race and Media (hereafter SCRAM), had separated from FTN. Shifting focus from outcome-focused dedication to learning projects, in SCRAM we concern ourselves primarily with racial and social justice issues, and multimodal praxis-based community building. With a background in multimedia-based instruction in my graduate training, I was familiar with the technologically inflected aims of FTN’s feminist pedagogical experiments. I was less knowledgeable about grassroots organizing, aside from earlier collaborations I had with the participatory action research-based project Mobile Voices/Voces Móviles (hereafter VozMob) in 2009/2010.⁸ Through FTN I gained an understanding of digital feminist pedagogies, and through VozMob I learned about critical pedagogy, popular education, and participatory action research. All these experiences proved significant at AMC. I began to appreciate what they held in common and what distinguished them from one other—how they signaled different approaches, investments, lineages, and methods. I became aware of their influence in my own practice, and in that of my colleagues. At AMC I witnessed how gathering in that messiness—in difference, in commonality, or simply together in a shared moment—could be enjoyable if approached with openness.

Another significant practice that contributes to AMC’s “fertile ground” for collective future-making is inspiration derived from the science fiction writing of Octavia E. Butler. In session after session, it would be difficult to miss Butler’s influence as her name and work are mentioned frequently. AMC 2010 programming explicitly honored Butler by dedicating a symposium to her and her fictional works (Bailey 2013). brown extends this homage in Emergent Strategy, frequently referencing the writer’s stories and characters. While AMC and brown have a reciprocal, mutually constitutive relationship that I will describe in more detail in a later section, for now clarification of how brown’s phrase “shaping change” directly references a religious tenet from Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) provides useful context. An important distillation of a fictional religion called Earthseed, which is based on the teachings of the novel’s main character Lauren Oya Olamina, is provided in the following verse:

Why is the universe?
To shape God.

Why is God?
To shape the universe. (1993, p 78)

Within Butler’s Parable series, which also includes Parable of the Talents (1998), the verse is part of the fictional religious collection Earthseed: The Books of Living. Within the story, Olamina’s Earthseed opens with the same verse that opens Butler’s book:

All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God Is Change. (3)

Mycelium: Interconnectedness

In her book The Next American Revolution, Detroit organizing legend/ancestor Grace Lee Boggs describes AMC organizers as “embody[ing] the spirit and hope emanating from Detroit [that is] increasingly rubbing off on the out-of-town participants who come to our city” (2012, 173). Boggs also describes in the book how after her closing remarks at AMC 2008 she noticed differences between her experiences as a civil rights activist in the 1960s and the style of organizing practiced at AMC. She writes the goals of the generation she came up in aimed “to agitate and mobilize faceless masses.” She elaborates, “There was none of the respectful listening to everyone, no breaking up into small groups so that everyone can participate and contribute, none of the laughter that makes an event like the Allied Media Conference such a joy. Our meetings and our demonstrations lacked the sense that our souls and the souls of those we worked with are growing, that in our relationships and in our community organizing, we are patiently building a spiritual framework for our everyday lives” (174). What Boggs describes here as the patient “building of a spiritual framework” coincides with another one of the network principles previously mentioned, which states AMC’s intention to “build a network of people and organizations developing long-term solutions based on immediate confrontation” (Allied Media Projects 2022c) that is committed to “begin by listening.” Attention to everyday small contributions and the spiritual offers a compelling alternative for what a network can do. It can honor multiple stories as it weaves a network of trust across space and time. Consider the emphasis on the temporal commitment to simultaneous movement engaged in the long term and immediate; this orientation guides how the Allied Media Projects network uses natural metaphors to describe its processes. Shared leadership and cooperation are key, spiritual work is acknowledged and celebrated. AMC attends to the bodymindspirits of its participants, through its core values and its everyday practices of radical hospitality.⁹

Programming for AMC 2017, 2018, and 2020 each included a network gathering for the FTN collective, for which I acted as a co-coordinator over the years.¹⁰ Coordinators of this programming continue to gather at the AMC conference, considering it an organizational, activist home. At AMC 2022 we titled the workshop “Situated Critical Race and Media” to reflect the name of the collective (SCRAM) that has coordinated under the name FemTechNet at the conference for the past five years. The SCRAM collective is composed of Alexandrina Agloro, Anne Cong-Huyen, George Hoagland, Hong-An (Ann) Wu, and myself. During our 2018 network gathering, one of our activities was based on the symbol of mycelium, which hails from the work of Complex Movements, described in brown’s book. All conference participants were welcome to join our session. Wanting to embrace the conference’s ethos of openness, we did not want to restrict attendance to the gathering in any way. The mycelium exercise was an icebreaker type activity that encouraged participants to draw a map of the “critical connections” that joined conference attendees convened at their table. These could vary from shared interests, contacts unexpectedly held in common, an enthusiasm for dance parties. Anything. The casualness followed from our understanding of the AMC culture and values to that point, and also the open-ended character of brown’s book. We hoped to approximate its energy and attitude to cultivate connection within the smaller scale of our network gathering.

brown introduced the network principles of the Allied Media Projects, along with its related methods of facilitation, collaboration, and media-based organizing to a larger reading public with her New York Times bestseller Emergent Strategy. The book was the first publication in AK Press’s series with the same name, edited by brown.¹¹ Key to its intervention is to use the concept of “emergence” to combine inspiration, creativity, and facilitation in “apply[ing] natural order and our love of life to the ways we create the next world” (brown 2017, 4). Categorized as both “self-help” and “social science,” the book offers examples to consider when bringing together imagination, communication, and material practice in building more just, community-oriented futures. It outlines how organizing methods can transform by applying lessons learned from science fiction, visionary fiction, as well as from biomimetics/biomimicry, and permaculture.

Despite being published the previous year, mention of brown’s book continued frequently during AMC 2018. As SCRAM used the mycelium as a metaphor for deep social connection in our workshop activity and as we continued to engage with concepts from brown’s book in writing about how we worked together collectively, I was prompted to think through how Emergent Strategy had captured the imagination of AMC. Beyond the critical personal bonds brown had forged at AMC year after year, what about her work resonated so profoundly with the AMC communities? While the exciting application of science fiction to social movements explains some of brown’s popularity, how has her use of examples from popular natural sciences functioned to provide media-based organizers with attractive methods of communication? And zooming out from brown’s work, what unexpected continuities or shared values with dominant technocultures are concealed in nature metaphors that connect organizing communication with commercial digital culture?

I turn now to a closer analysis of how brown’s written work uses nature metaphors, focusing mostly on Emergent Strategy. Fundamental to the book’s organization, brown identifies six elements to describe the emergent strategy framework that she repeatedly relates back to the natural world. brown first provides a general dictionary definition of the words comprising each element and then provides examples from plant or animal life that relates to each. These stories come from brown and her interlocutors, frequently fellow organizers who are also observers of nature. Occasionally the groundings feature insights from science writers or specialists.¹² Each element is further explored with examples and suggested activities related to facilitation work in the book’s chapter “Tools for Emergent Strategy Facilitation.” The six elements brown identifies for Emergent Strategy are fractals; intentional adaptation; interdependence and decentralization; nonlinear and iterative; resilience; and creating more possibilities. The element of fractals (“the relationship between small and large”) is first “ground[ed] in nature” by pointing to the spiral as a pattern found in diverse situations ranging from the shape of galaxies, cauliflower, ferns, deltas, veins, and so on (brown 2017, 51). The element of resilience (“how we recover and transform”) is explained by evoking stories of mushrooms detoxing soil, of coral reefs providing the ocean floor with spaces of home and beauty (125). The element of interdependence and decentralization (“who we are and how we share”) is illustrated with observations of geese flocking, trees growing or becoming rooted, and mycelium networking mushrooms to enable communication.

After these “grounding in nature” metaphors introduce each element, the bulk of each chapter is devoted to providing stories from activist facilitation work. For brown, “in our best human practices, we watch the systems of the world and follow them” (2017, 153). By modeling from the patterns that structure complex systems of the natural world, we harness their “adaptive survival brilliance” (125) therefore “partner[ing] with change” (brown 2021, 3). This method is named for insights about emergence gained from Nick Obolensky’s Complex Adaptive Leadership, while also in dialogue with Margaret Wheatley’s Leadership and the New Science (1992).¹³ Emergent Strategy strives to develop blueprints for organizing in uncertainty through emergence, and the rich testimonials shared from activists in brown’s book also resonate with the key concepts that Obolensky writes define complexity: “self-organization, inter-relatedness, adaptiveness and emergence” (Obolensky 97). Beyond a coherent application of emergence in organizing work, Emergent Strategy brings dialogue between brown and her network of activists, collaborators, friends, “woes”—friends with whom one works on excellence in order to intentionally grow (brown 2017, 29)—to a larger audience.

Related to its broader appeal, beyond leadership and activist circles, the book holds science fiction literature as a strong overarching influence, specifically fiction from Octavia E. Butler. brown describes her initial attraction to emergent strategy through Butler’s stories, wherein the approach was a “way for describing the adaptive and relational leadership model found” in the writer’s work (2017, 18). This is the innovation of brown’s work, to combine an interest in emergent strategy from leadership studies—work that is already fundamentally interdisciplinary in making connections between business and the history of natural sciences—to “visionary fiction,” a term coined by a significant collaborator of brown’s, Walidah Imarisha. brown elaborates that the term is used “to describe the work of people who use fiction to advance justice and liberation” (27).

Highlighting nature metaphors within a popular genre like science fiction prompts Emergent Strategy’s readers to approach facilitation methods with imagination. Nature metaphors can be attractive as they are familiar in the world that surrounds us. The source domain for such metaphors are relations between nonhuman animals, the environment, and humans.¹⁴ One way to overcome barriers to understanding advanced future technologies or organizational structures is to explain them through the complex workings of nature, demystifying otherwise illegible, unrelatable systems. The level of depth in referencing nature, however, can vary widely from engaging with rigorous research on different ecosystems to the superficial inclusion of animal, plant, and environment representations as mere mascots.¹⁵ With the Emergent Strategy series, brown and her collaborators are clearly interested in shifting attention from apex species and king of the jungle characterizations of charismatic leadership toward species in nature more known for cooperation and collaboration; more focus on ants and starlings, less on lions, tigers, and bears. Scratching beyond the image of the animal may be just one step in understanding how human perception of the natural world flattens complexity when abstracting the natural world into metaphors.

brown discusses her method of finding the most suitable metaphor(s) in We Will Not Cancel Us (2020), in which she addresses miscommunicating through metaphor in online discussions. In a chapter titled “Bringing Abolition Home: Learning and Untangling in Public,” brown deliberates over her missteps when she first shared writings about cancel or call-out culture on her blog. She reflects on mistakes with language, and in particular, inappropriate uses of metaphor before including a revised version of the material first featured on these blog posts. brown writes, “the most consistent critique was about the metaphors I chose to work with” (2020, 24). She goes on to “apologize for reaching for the low hanging fruit of these dramatic metaphors when there are other ways to speak of mob energy that are less inflammatory, based in nature, and accurate without being incendiary” (25). Instead of metaphors that equate experiencing being called out online with violent death, brown revises her discussion of cancel culture through the metaphoric concepts of the feeding frenzy and cancer. While this change in metaphor provides more distance from human violence, they nonetheless flatten processes observed in animal behavior and human biology to symbolize destruction. brown’s attempt to carry nature metaphors used in the emergent strategy framework, with its focus on collaboratively imagining more just futures, to political commentary about contemporary social media conditions in We Will Not Cancel Us appears to exhaust the usefulness (and perhaps goodwill) of nature metaphors.

Dandelions: Decentralization and Regeneration

In framing Emergent Strategy brown is careful to describe how the book and the practice that it outlines is fundamentally influenced by her relationships with others. In a section titled “Lineage of Emergent Strategy,” she names particular people, stating, “Butler, Wheatley, [Invincible] ill [Weaver], Grace, myself, and many others have been growing a strong system of relationships for considering emergence as a game-changing approach to movement work” (2017, 29). In community with Boggs and Weaver, brown finds suitable “language and frameworks” for understanding the leadership models Butler writes into her science fiction. Emergent Strategy is directly influenced by Boggs’s engagement with Wheatley’s concept of “emergence—interdependence, iteration, being in relationship with constantly changing conditions, fractals” (28). Complex Movements, a collective of another mentee of Boggs, ill Weaver, created the “emblem system” brown uses to visualize her book’s six elements (45–46). Whereas, brown’s Emergent Strategy demonstrates the importance of pursuing “emergence” through nature metaphors in facilitation (mostly enabled by organizing workshops engaged with movement building), Complex Movements works through similar concepts in multimodal audio-visual performance/installation formats, alongside a hybrid activist/artistic practice.

Complex Movements’ membership includes graphic designer/fine artist/animator Wesley Taylor; music producer/sound designer/ filmmaker Waajeed; lyricist/organizer Invincible (Weaver); artist/ designer L05 (Carlos Garcia); and producer/cultural strategist Sage Crump.¹⁶ The group’s broad purpose is to “support the transformation of communities by exploring connections between complex science and social justice movements through multimedia interactive performance work” (Complex Movements | Emergence Media 2016). brown describes “their emblem system [as] a gorgeous way of learning properties of nature we can apply to our work” (2017, 46). The system includes characters that are formations and/or entities from the natural world, such as ants, wavicles, dandelions, mycelium, etc. Each entry includes a drawing along with a description of the emblem’s physical or behavioral qualities, and their symbolic significance for community organizing.

A significant emblem for my inquiry here, and for Complex Movements’ 2015–2016 mobile art installation Beware of the Dandelions is the titular composite plant, which signifies “resilience, resistance, regeneration, [and] decentralization” in the collective’s lexicon (brown 2017, 46). Quoting from the group’s definition of the plant, brown mentions how the dandelion is frequently mistaken for a weed and targeted for removal. Complex Movements emphasizes its “medicinal properties,” and how the plant survives by resisting uprooting. Dandelions disperse seeds with an ingenious design—a “seed [with] a tiny parachute that allows it to spread far and wide in the wind” (46). The plant also inspires facets of Beware of the Dandelions’ mobile and mutable form. The project toured the US widely, extending the reach of the collective’s influence, before returning to Detroit. The project’s site was multipurpose, operating as a stage for live performances, digital multimodal installation art, and community organizing alike.¹⁷

Metaphoric engagement with the dandelion also shapes the project’s narrative at several story junctures. Beware of the Dandelions tells a science fictional tale set in a dystopian future. It portrays an uprising of community members who mobilize to protest the untimely death of a beloved elder, the character of GG. Following this loss, GG’s family and friends channel their mourning into action, catalyzing the Dandelion Revolution. They work together to wrest control of the community’s food supply away from an exploitative corporation. The real-life multimedia performance takes place “inside a 400 square foot polyhedron dome-like pod structure” (Complex Movements | Emergence Media 2016) designed for audience members to project themselves to the twenty-fifth century, a future where corporations grant access to eternal life to the rich while cruelly oppressing the labor force (Salant 2016). The pod becomes the “planetation hub” while audience members are recast as activists who commandeer control of the hub.

Weaver voices all fourteen story characters (Salant 2016), though each one sounds distinctly different through the combined efforts of Weaver’s virtuosic vocal performance and producer Wajeed’s sonic manipulations. While the achievement of these pitch shifts may seem to meet a practical need—representing different “factions” with just one voice—there is a deeper practice of shapeshifting at play here. Weaver’s voice becomes a metaphor-making assemblage. Weaver’s natural voice melds with technology to create an expansive cast. Characters include Zakera, the story’s most prominently featured activist protagonist; Maji, a water runner representing the story world’s illegal networks; Dr. K, a scientist responsible for producing an apple seed capable of extending lifespans, only available to the wealthy; a robotic-voiced “dome dweller” aligned with the ruling class; and groundskeepers, who squash worker dissent on the planetation. Weaver also voices the workers paid to harvest genetically modified crops for a corporation they finally rise up against following GG’s death.

People from these different groups unite to overthrow the corporate control that oppresses the townspeople, keeping them in debt and servitude. The story’s propulsive energy forward dips, however, when factions disagree on the details of a shared strategy. Dandelions appear as a key alternative crop in the group’s deliberations, chosen to counter the corrupted, corporate-controlled apple orchards. Through community deliberation the point is conceded that dandelions cannot be the exclusive answer; it cannot function as a monocrop. By the story’s end, the group arrives at a workable solution that requires collaborating with the land formerly occupied by corporate control, but now recuperated as a site of biodiversity. Genetically modified crops are burned, and those apple orchards can now find new life as home to complex, “interdependent ecosystems” enabled by relationships between different crops. Apples will continue to grow, in harmony with the composite plant misrecognized as a weed (Complex Movements 2016).

The dandelion is both figurative and literal in Beware of the Dandelions. The plant appears prominently in its plot and also in the mythos created by the characters. Dandelion is represented as crop, myth, plant, guide, metaphor, guide, and collaborator. The song titled “GG and Zakera” depicts a flashback scene featuring a still living GG who instructs child Zakera to “drink up all your dandy tea” before she shares a bedtime story. The tale features a moment in the collective’s past when a debate about what to do with dandelion crops resulted in the townspeople splintering off into factions. In Zakera’s recollection, it becomes clear the two are talking about more than the composite plant. GG’s lessons hold Zakera’s thoughts, echoing with the lines “how one day you’ll be one to rebuild the lost art / that was destroyed when they began arguing who would lead.” The conversation continues between detained adult Zakera and GG speaking from a spiritual plane. Zakera says,

Indeed, that was the day we saw the last murmuration
you told me pass the story onto future generations
and in your poignant wisdom
you showed me how they fly
we looked up in the sky
and it seemed like pointillism. (Complex Movements 2016)

GG finally makes the lesson from the nature metaphor explicit when she explains the objective of coordinated collective action: “no leader to be singled out and killed or put in prison.” Ending the song, the listener’s attention is directed exclusively on the vocals as a brief dip in the volume of all other sonic elements isolates Weaver’s delivery of this last line. An ominous swelling back of the accompanying instruments accentuates their absence in the previous beat and is followed with the synthy sound of a siren. Learning from the movements of dandelions provides Zakera (and by extension, the group) with an answer for how to not only rebuild biodiversity in their physical ecosystems but also their figurative organizing systems.¹⁸ Observing and replicating patterns from nature guides the characters in Beware of the Dandelions to protect one another, strategically dispersing inevitable attention from repressive forces determined to harm them.

In their live performance of the piece, documented in the OnBoards.tv recording, the group explicitly frames the Beware of the Dandelions story as one dedicated to recently departed ancestors from Detroit, including Grace Lee Boggs (1915–2015), Charity Mahouna Hicks (1969–2014), Cheri “Sheddy” Rollins Sanchez (1986–2014). This dedication technology also shapes the last song on the officially released album called “Wage Love.” This song sits outside the narrative concerning the planetation and class struggle. Yet the story contains acts that are related to lessons learned from ancestors who transitioned after Complex Movements’ performances of Beware of the Dandelions in Seattle but before their performances in Dallas and return to Detroit in October 2016 (Aldridge 2017). The song “Wage Love” directly quotes Hicks, who was founder of the Detroit People’s Water Board (Commons Magazine 2014) and the mentoring/guiding/ancestral presence of both Hicks and Boggs is felt throughout the album, especially in the character of GG whose death acts as the catalyst for the story’s main events.

The fictional character of GG is modeled from the real-life inspiration of Hicks’s and Boggs’s activist mentorship. Complex Movements not only acknowledges this in interviews about Beware of the Dandelions; they also explicitly name the inspiration as a practice of dedication in the workshops that follow their performances. This practice of adding workshop facilitation (led by collective member Sage Crump) to the immersive musical storytelling of their multimodal performances adds a nonfiction element to their science fictional approach that makes connections between the imagined planetation and major American cities like Seattle, Dallas, and Detroit—most sincerely, always and forever Detroit.

Complex Movements weaves together metaphor, practical facilitation techniques, and heartfelt dedication through their concept emblem system. They very carefully situate how future places will map onto similar power dynamics carved into the contemporary moment, related to past oppressions. The planetation is a future setting that intentionally resonates with contemporary city life in Detroit, also Seattle and Dallas where Beware of the Dandelions toured. The collective deliberately places participants in multiple locations at once: the time/place they are physically located, whether that be Detroit, Seattle, or Dallas; the speculative future world of the planetation depicted within the story told in the performance/installation; and activist Detroit from which Complex Movements’ members honor in their work. The past, present, and future collapse in both encouraging and discouraging ways, just as metaphor and the practicalities of everyday life do in the fictional story’s environmental themes.

Conclusion

In writing this article, I admit to working through experiences with AMC that productively upended my own practices of research, teaching, and facilitation related to digital culture. As I continue to experiment with my own approaches to digital feminist praxis, I find that acts of gathering and meeting are most important. Throughout this article, I consider how AMC and its collaborators forge a technology, or praxis, of gathering. I am influenced by feminist STS, Black feminist honoring, and women of color feminist praxis in my reading of the antiracist leadership and shimmering generosity practices of AMC’s Detroit.¹⁹ I intend for this to be just one entry in my continuing relationship with AMC and its collaborators, which includes my participation coordinating with the conference as part of SCRAM. I continue to learn a great deal from AMC, brown, Complex Movements, and Detroit.

It is through shared geographic proximity, their emotional and personal entanglements, their dedication to the same Detroit figures—Grace Lee Boggs, Charity Hicks—that the connections between AMC, brown, and Complex Movements are obvious. But focusing too much on these overlapping details may obscure the greater themes of interdependence that are thoughtfully, yet differently, applied in AMC programming, brown’s writing, and Complex Movements’ Beware of the Dandelions. Beyond being dedicated to specific individuals—Boggs, Sanchez, and most explicitly Hicks—Beware of the Dandelions builds a broader narrative in which dedication and listening to the wisdom of one’s community elders serves as the best method of survival for the story’s collective protagonists. For example, the song “DNA,” includes the following lyrics:

How are your memories kept when hard drives crash?
How will you archive your past?
These are the stories that we store in our DNA.
These are the songs that we store in our DNA. (Complex Movements 2016)

While understanding the biological material of DNA as genetic evidence is fraught, Complex Movements de-emphasizes blood relations throughout the album, instead insisting on how what survives time are community practices passed down generation to generation. This emphasis on social relation is demonstrated in the characters of GG and Zakera, who are the story’s closest related characters, but are referred to as connected by grandsibling relations. It’s uncertain if the family connections are through blood, and that does not seem to matter. As Alondra Nelson puts it in describing the intricacies of genetic politics, “DNA can be used to embody the past, and because DNA is shared it can represent both individuals and groups” (2016, 15).²⁰ Perhaps Complex Movements uses DNA as shorthand, or even a metaphor, for these entanglements between time periods, between generations, shifting DNA’s application as mode of evidence traditionally used for structural exclusion (connect biology to family and financial inheritance) to a more wide-ranging inclusion.

Notes