In 1984, a filmmaker and activist named Ben Caldwell established a community art and media center, in Leimert Park, in South Central Los Angeles, that would become known as KAOS Network. His dream was to create a place for young African Americans to build sustainable, self-reliant systems for producing and distributing their art. In the nineteen-seventies, Caldwell had been part of a community of young Black filmmakers in Los Angeles–a movement, which included Charles Burnett and Julie Dash, later dubbed the L.A. Rebellion–and he hoped to empower the next generation of kids to fashion their own alternatives to traditional media. He opened KAOS Network to all: a group of young rappers who would later become known as Project Blowed; videographers and aspiring journalists; Afrofuturist thinkers and writers; drag-ball performers; and also Yoruba Christian congregations, theatre companies, dancers, and artists. Today, collaborators working out of KAOS Network are making games, augmented reality, even autonomous vehicles. "KAOS Theory: The Afrokosmic Ark of Ben Caldwell," by Caldwell and Robeson Taj Frazier, a professor at U.S.C., is a spellbinding book documenting the filmmaker's life and work. Caldwell's restlessness of spirit is mimicked in the book's elaborate, frenetic design. It is one of the most beautiful objects I held in my hands this year, a coffee-table book as much as a rigorous monograph, full of archival images, photographs, flyers, and documents telling the story of Caldwell's life, from his New Mexico childhood, to his military service in Southeast Asia (where he first became seriously interested in photography), to his arrival in Los Angeles, in the seventies, all of it culminating in KAOS Network, and the worlds Caldwell has helped manifest.–Hua Hsu "The New Yorker" (12/5/2023 12:00:00 AM)
