STATIC / BLOOM /
Lo-fi futures
TRANSMISSION #003 | December 2025 | ARWA
In today’s entry:
🌸 In Bloom — Recap from Lo-Fi Futures, a tiny exhibit of works in progress by friends who make things! A few thoughts about returning to the physical after almost 10 years in the ultra-virtual. And some bonus spoken word from a talented friend, Kubi!
🧚🏿♀️ From the Lab — Some sneak peaks from my experiments with light, form & color for my newest world Black Fairytales (Exist)
🖤 Shadow Notes —An poem from 2017 about sharing Art and some more entries into the Dictionary of Received Anxieties
🌸 In Bloom
Last week, a few friends and I put on a tiny rooftop exhibition called LO-FI FUTURES —a night for sharing whatever we were working on, at whatever stage it existed. The idea was simple: don’t overthink it; bring whatever you’re making and show it as-is.
We had DJs, plays in progress, film updates, new tracks, a freshly completed EP, visual art, physical installations, gelato experiments, and mysterious cocktails. It was a vibe. People left wanting more.
Recap Video
It was a vibe. People left wanting more.
Coming together to share our Art keeps us creative. It makes us a little vulnerable. It builds connection at a time when connection feels harder to access—expensive, even.
Film Photography by Kadeem Morris
insta: @jamrockdawg
Lately, I've found myself quietly rebelling against the algorithms shaping how we create and how we think. “Collective consciousness” should be a force against oppression, but instead it’s starting to feel like a flattening of the mind—a dependence on one system to do our thinking for us. I get the ick when I read writing that has ChatGPT’s voice all over it—not because the machine is bad, but because we’re all starting to sound identical.
But I’m not a doomsday person either. Art and design have always survived disruption. Every trend is a retaliation to the one before it. And as AI pushes visuals toward the hyperreal, I’m feeling the pull back toward the physical: A butterfly in spring. A morning walk. Bougainvillea in bloom. A concert with my lover. Rib-cracking laughs with my girlfriends. Gelato tastings. A pen on paper. These things have become my anchors and my tools for self expression have gravitated such toward the tangible as well: community, prototypes, textures, screens-off experiences, light, color, cement, paint.
“Collective Consciousness” should be a force against oppression, but instead it’s starting to feel like a flattening of the mind.
This shift is surprising given where I started. I began working in AR/VR in 2016, when we believed immersive tech could expand imagination—could transport us into other worlds. My Master’s Thesis tried to measure exactly that: the impact of ethereal VR experiences on the imaginative lives of Kenyan women in informal settlements.
But even then, I saw how hardware not built for us shapes what we’re allowed to experience. And today, with AI, the pattern feels familiar. The same exclusions. The same flattening. The same slow contraction of imagination—only this time, the “oppressor” is faceless, omnipresent, and embedded into how we think. I even wrote about this in 2021, before GenAI was the cultural obsession it is now showing that these dynamics have always been there. Long before that paper, other researchers like Ruha Benjamin, Timnit Gebrew and many others had already been sounding the alarm: the problem isn’t the technology itself, but the systems of oppression that shape it. [Beyond Algorithmic Bias: A Socio-Computational Interrogation of the Google Search by Image Algorithm].
A butterfly in spring. A morning walk. Bougainvillea in bloom. A concert with my lover. Rib-cracking laughs with my girlfriends. Gelato tastings. A pen on paper. These things have become my anchors - small, physicalities that steady me in a world run by algorithms.
I still think AI can be useful. I feel its benefits in my own creative process. But we need guardrails: intentional choices about how we see, touch, and use it. And the more I talked to friends about their creative processes, the clearer it became that the real struggle was everything beneath that bubbles beneath the surface: self-doubt, finances, health, visas, relationships, burnout. For most, some combination of all of the above.
This prompted me to hit up Teni, one of my most creative friends, with a debut album on the way, to ask if we should do a tiny show. Nothing fancy. Just “works in progress.” shared amongst a safe group of friends (highly recommend replicating with your people!).
The night ended with the same collective feeling: we are surrounded by talent, and our imaginations are still radically running rampant. It was like a big collective exhale– there is so much to hope for.
We insisted on unfinished work. We welcomed the rough edges. And in doing that, we exposed the parts of ourselves that want to create despite all the valid reasons not to.
The magic was in the we of it all.
And when coming together feels this good, why would we relent to an algorithm— when we have already outlived every oppressor so far?
we are surrounded by talent, and our imaginations are still radically running rampant.
And when coming together feels this good, why would we relent to an algorithm— when we have already outlived every oppressor so far?
Bonus Content!
Higher Thoughts by Kubi
Higher Thoughts is a collection of revelations (downloads) I’ve received over the years during moments when I’ve felt like I was in a state of higher consciousness. These thoughts, sometimes expressed in the form of poetry, touch on topics of love, connection, and humanity.led:
🧚🏿♀️ From the Lab
Some teasers, tests and in progress creations from my new world, Black Fairytales (Exist). The world is still very much in formation and discovery. The focus right now is to keep playing, keep following instinct as I refine and develop my the distinct color palette of this Universe.
🖤 Shadow Notes
A Poem
I want to talk to someone about my Art
I want to talk to someone about my Art.
I want to have them touch it, be touched by it,
and then touch me.
I want someone to care about it like I care about it -
what it was before me, what it becomes after them.
Someone whose questions color my portraits,
shape my geometries,
condense my language,
expand my palettes.
To love someone for the Art they make,
the stories they confess under dim, soft orange light.
And we become each other’s muses,
our curiosity: electricity at the bottom of the ocean.
I want us to make Art that is neither right nor wrong,
just
True.
-twenty.seventeen
Dictionary of Received Anxieties
Blisscliff (n.) The fear that just as life crests into something golden, the fall is already on its way; that happiness this sharp can only be a warning.
Chaosis (n.) The creeping suspicion that you’re not in the chaos; you are the chaos.
Winexiety (n.) The sharp morning-after dread that as fast as wine flowed, so did your mouth.
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