Speculative Cartographies: Afrofuturism 2.0 and Digital Re-Mapping

Through LiDAR and photogrammetry, a new kind of augmentation emerges—one that overlays physical terrain with ancestral, symbolic, and spatial knowledge. The memory-site page for the Robinson Family Home exemplifies this approach. While Scaniverse’s upload limitations prevented the full context from being displayed—including a storage shed, family land boundaries, and surrounding forest—the annotations allow layered narration, communicating supplemental memory beyond the visible scan.

Platform limitations, such as Sketchfab’s file size restrictions, obstruct the rendering of full spatial context. But these absences also intensify the speculative function of annotation: enabling users to layer memory onto what is absent, not only what is seen. Despite these constraints, the scans and their presentation constitute a form of vernacular augmented reality—one that resists settler aesthetics by activating community memory and narrative.

Inspired by the techno-vernacular creativity of Houston Conwill, Estella Majozo Conwill, and Sanford Biggers, this project incorporates a digital quilt as a map interface. Each memory site—whether church, homestead, or burial ground—is represented by a quilt code symbol historically linked to the Underground Railroad. These codes, long debated as navigational semaphores for enslaved people in flight, function here as aesthetic signals and mnemonic devices, extending Black cartographic traditions into the digital.²

For instance, the First Union African Baptist Church is represented by the Carpenter’s Wheel, a secondary code pattern that, according to oral tradition, referenced Jesus as the “master carpenter.” While enslavers interpreted spirituals like Swing Low, Sweet Chariot as expressions of religious longing, they often contained directional cues—pointing west-northwest toward Ohio and freedom.³ Similarly, the navigation menu that appears on every page of Daufuskie3D takes the form of the Drinking Gourd or North Star, an emblem used to guide maritime escape routes from Cleveland or Detroit to Canada.

The significance of this quilt-as-map took on new relevance with the unveiling of Sanford Biggers’ Madrigal (2024), a sculpture installed at MIT’s Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building. Biggers, who views quilts as vernacular art and spiritual archive, sees himself as a “late collaborator” with their unknown creators.⁴ His work transforms quilt patterns into abstract monuments, recognizing them as spatial technologies of resistance. Like Biggers, this project treats quilt code symbolism not as historical fact or myth, but as cultural infrastructure—expressive, insurgent, and communal.

In this context, the quilt interface of Daufuskie3D functions as a digital cosmogram: a speculative, recursive, and symbolically encoded map. It remaps cultural space in dialogue with ancestral technologies, vernacular practices, and Black epistemologies of memory and mobility.