NEW YORK, NY.- The Whitney Museum of American Art launches Warpmode, This is not a game!, a digital art project by Jazsalyn commissioned for artport, the Museum’s online gallery space for Internet art. A digital extension of the artist’s worldbuilding toolkit Warpmode, the project invites viewers to contemplate multidimensional layers of Blackness through a series of prompts. Jazsalyn produced Warpmode with the experimental curatorial project Black Beyond and published the toolkit through Metalabel in 2024. Expanding on the original physical toolkit, Warpmode, This is not a game! introduces Ancestral Intelligence as a framework for an alternative form of artificial intelligence, one rooted in the human experience of learning and developing skills and rituals.
The original Warpmode takes the form of forty prompt-based player cards organized around four Black Metatheories: Afrofuturism, Afronowism, Afrovoidism, and Afropocalypse. Together, these frameworks propose using recovered histories and knowledge systems to imagine renewal and possible futures. Warpmode, This is not a game! brings that framework into a digital environment and places 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. With this, the work considers intelligence through the human experience of learning, skill-building, and ritual.
As participants move through Warpmode, This is not a game!, they encounter prompts that invite reflection and response. Rather than collecting any identifying information, the submitted responses remain anonymous and become incorporated as part of the artwork itself. The contributions form a memory cloud that visualizes patterns in the collective responses to the cards’ prompts.
“Jazsalyn’s extension of the Warpmode card deck into the online space opens up new possibilities for both participation and contemplation,” said Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney. “The filtering of participants’ comments creates a repository reflecting communal experiences and memories.”
Jazsalyn’s Warpmode, This is not a game! was organized by Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney, and commissioned for artport, the Museum’s portal to Internet art and an online gallery space for commissions of net art and new media art.
Jazsalyn (b. 1991, Raleigh, North Carolina) is an Afro-Carolinian artist and technologist. Moving between digital and physical space, her work extends to installation, gameplay-as-performance, and long-term projects to explore cooperative futures for complex human-to-nonhuman knowledge systems. Jazsalyn developed Ancestral Intelligence (2020-present) as a framework for alternative AI: our earliest forms of knowledge systems, philosophies, and traditions passed down through generations within indigenous and diasporic communities. She experiments with video game engines to create emergent forms of video art by converting game environments into interactive landscapes to recover traces of ancestral data and memory. Jaszalyn has been teaching at Yale School of Art, has written curricula on African and Diaspora rituals at The New School, and lectured at institutions including Harvard University. She also organizes Black Beyond, an experimental, artist-led curatorial project where she curates exhibitions and experiences to define alternate realities for (b)lackness. Her work has been supported by Serpentine Arts Technologies, Pioneer Works, New Museum’s NEW INC, Onassis ONX, MTA Arts & Design, Creative Time, among others. Her work has been featured in publications such as Contemporary And, Cultured, and The New Yorker.
