In Flow Reimagined, artist Andrew F. Scott extends his long-standing inquiry into the convergence of sonic narrative, digital image-making, and cultural memory. Reframing Terence Blanchard’s seminal 2005 album Flow, Scott constructs a distinct visual architecture that transforms the concert into an immersive ritual, part performance, part immersive projection-mapped environment, and part Afro-Futurist meditation. This work is emblematic of Scott’s evolving practice, which increasingly engages artificial intelligence as a visual generation tool and collaborator in the speculative design of memory, identity, and time.
Thematically, Flow Reimagined builds on Scott’s decades-long exploration of diasporic consciousness and the role of ancestral knowledge in shaping contemporary Black experience. His use of AI-generated animations—crafted through a tightly controlled process of prompt engineering and digital compositing—evokes celestial geographies, ancestral architectures, and hybrid forms that oscillate between organic and algorithmic. These projected environments do not serve as passive backdrops but emerge as visual interlocutors to Blanchard’s composition, evolving in real time with the emotional and structural shifts of the ensemble’s performance.
Scott’s collaboration with Terence Blanchard and the E-Collective deepens the interdisciplinary thrust of the project. Together, they choreograph a spatial dialogue in which sound and image are equal agents of meaning. Integral to this dialogue is the live camera work of Matt Unkenholz, whose remote-operated systems capture and magnify the performers’ gestures in real time. These image feeds are interwoven into Scott’s visual tapestry, heightening the improvisational moment and establishing a feedback loop between musician, artist, and audience. The result is a layered perceptual space that blurs the boundaries between documentation and interpretation, presence and projection.
Through Flow Reimagined, Scott reasserts the power of immersive media to bridge the personal and the planetary, the ancient and the emergent. It is a work that locates Afro-Futurism not in distant tomorrows, but in the immediacy of live experience and shared resonance.
Andrew F. Scott, visual design and production, Terence Blanchard, SFJazz Residency: Flow Re-Imagined. Terence Blanchard, Visual Artistic Director, trumpet, Marcus Strickland, saxophone, E-Collective Collective (Charles Altura, guitar; Julian Pollack, piano; David Ginyard, bass; Oscar Seaton, drums); Matt Unkenholz, remote cameras and technical direction. SFJazz, Miner Auditorium, San Francisco, CA, January 23, 2025.