Congo Square” explores Afrofuturism as a dynamic historical project of Afrocentric world building and liberating subjectivity, undertaken by descendants of the African diaspora to give new life to our deepest selves. Using virtual reality as both a tool of art-making and as a visual language, I create worlds that center West African cosmology and sacred geometry, while sampling music from notable African American musicians and featuring prominent black scholars as interlocutors: Dr. Eddie Glaude Jr., Howard Thurman, and Avery Brooks.

For this project, I created 5 VR scenes and 5 corresponding soundtracks. I created the 3d models in Maya through a mixture of building with polygon primitives, and augmenting photogrammetric models downloaded from Sketchfab. Once created, I exported .fbx files to Unity, using that software to build and run to the Oculus Quest. The soundtracks were made using GarageBand and attached to central elements within each Unity scene. In its original iteration, I wrote C# scripts that allowed the user to change scenes by walking towards highlighted areas

Software Used: Autodesk Maya, Unity, GarageBand