ZAM

ZAM: The Black Archive
designed by the artist Zoid Hæm

ZAM is a digital Black archive where visual poetry, history, and music collide to challenge the past and envision the future. Developed through the B2 Creative Residency at the ATLAS Institute, ZAM is part installation, part ritual DJ performance, and part strategy video game. It invites visitors to step inside a living, flickering memory engine that listens, speaks back, and refuses to let Black life be erased.

Inside a 360-degree field of projection, chopped and screwed images of Black life loop and fracture around the audience while motion sensors and sound respond to where bodies move in the room. Sight, sound, and atmosphere work together so that all senses are engaged, and the black box behaves less like a static exhibit and more like a living, listening organism.

At the heart of this experience is Nommo, an in-game Oracle who guides initiates through the halls of the archive, offering poetic counsel and tactical prompts. Through Nommo, each visitor carves a one-of-a-kind path through history, blurring the line between archive, divination, and video game.

Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation, ZAM moves between what is recorded and what is missing, stitching together documents, rumor, memory, and myth. It is a technology of remembering and an experiment in how art, sound, and speculative narrative can help us navigate the dangerous present and sketch survivable futures. Above all, ZAM asks how we might move differently, individually, and collectively, once we have walked inside the archive and felt it looking back.

On Saturday, February 21, artist Zoid Hæm will lead a one night only live guided meditation through the archive, mixing the sounds of the diaspora with visual prophecies of cosmic rebellion for an embodied journey into ZAM’s Black future.

Zoid Hæm
Born 1987, Tulsa, OK. Based in Denver, CO and Harlem, NYC.

Zoid Hæm is a Black American artist whose multimedia practice explores Black myth in the digital age. After receiving a BFA in Film Studies from the University of Colorado Boulder, Zoid became the school’s first student to earn a dual graduate degree, completing an MFA in Photography and an MBA in Arts Administration. He is a professor, curator, filmmaker, published writer, ex NFL player, and founder of the creative design studio Zoid Art Haus.

Zoid’s artistic practice applies the research methods of autoethnography and critical fabulation to connect his own experiences to the wider cultural narratives of Black life in America and throughout the Black diaspora. His projects often use performance, immersive design, interactive media, and community outreach to transform spaces into communal places where myth and modernity meet.