In this video, I'll tell you the meaning of snake dreams. So if you have a dream about a snake, this is exactly what it means. I'm gonna go through different cultures, how they view this specific symbol, what it means, and what you can do about it. It's quite an interesting dream. It's probably the most searched for dream meaning that I'm aware of. So yeah, this is a very popular thing. It's happening for a reason. So like I said, to dream about a snake is not only the most popular dream thing, dream symbol or dream sign, but it's also the most misunderstood. So most people don't know what this actually means. So typically when you have a dream about a snake, the first thing you're gonna think is that it's bad, that it's evil, scary, represents some kind of fear, trauma, something bad, right? But it actually depends on the culture that of the place where you live. So it might not be bad. It actually might be a really good sign. Really depends first on where you actually, you know, where you live and the culture in the area you live. It's also very personal. This is something that I talk about in other videos about dream meanings, dream signs, is that what a dream about a snake will mean to you is very different to what it will mean to me. So you have to first, before you consider even listening to any of these dream meanings and interpretations, is ask yourself first, what does a snake mean to you?  What do you actually start to think about within yourself before you actually hear what it's supposed to mean? And then what you can do is that once you've asked yourself that question, you've asked yourself, okay, what does a snake mean to me? Then you can start to ask things about the snake in your particular dream. So you can say, for example, what was a snake doing in your dream? Was it a character? Did it have a name? What specific things was a snake doing in your dream? And when you answer that question, then you start to build up a picture about what it means for you because it's very personal. It's not like one meaning of a dream about a snake is the same as anybody else who dreams about a snake. Very, very personal, very specific. So start to build this idea, build these questions for yourself. Okay, so you had a dream about a snake. What was the snake doing? And in the moment, how did you feel about a snake? Did you feel excited and happy? Or did you feel scared? Maybe you felt betrayed because a common, especially in the UK and various other parts of the Western world, the meaning of the word snake means usually someone who betrays or a term you would use to describe somebody who kind of goes behind your back, sort of thing. So ask yourself what your feeling about the snake was in the dream. There's also a lot of things that are more psychological to deal with a snake. For example, is it that you were focusing on the coiling of the snake? How it's wrapped around something? Maybe it was actually protecting or hiding something. Or is it something to do with the facts where you're actually scared of the bite, let's say, the venom? Or is it something to do with the eyes? How it's kind of shifty? You don't really know where it's gonna look or what it's doing. Or is it something to do with other things, like maybe toxicity or friendship or a relationship? Only you can really answer these things. This is a bit different to most dream meaning videos you may have seen, like dream signs or what does this dream symbol mean? This might be a bit different because I'm actually kind of giving you the tools to answer it for yourself. If I just sat here and said, a dream about a snake means exactly this for everybody. You know it's not true because I don't know you. And I don't know specifically for your dream about a snake what aspect of the snake you were focusing on. So start to ask yourself what part of the snake was the focus of the dream? Was it the fangs? The danger associated with the bite? Was it the fact that it was coiled around something? Was it the fact that it was moving quickly and you were scared of that? Was it coming towards you or going away from you? How did you feel about that? Really, really build up a bigger picture about what the dream means. Don't just look at the symbol and just say, right, snake dream equals this meaning and then just that's it. There's very much more nuance than that. All dream meaning is very, very detailed. Your brain is much more detailed than you give it credit for. So it's not just as simple as snake dream equals this, okay? It's very, very specific for example. Okay, let's say if the snake was running away from you and that felt good, but then the snake was running towards somebody that you like or love, that could have a different meaning. If the person that the snake is running towards is excited about the snake coming towards them, again, that's another different meaning. So I know you're probably expecting, you know, snake dream meaning is this, but it really doesn't always have to be that simple. It's never that simple actually. If you look at dream meaning and interpretation as this dream symbol means this and it's like this binary thing like a dictionary, it doesn't really work like that because it's very different for everybody. So hopefully you all start to ask yourself questions like, okay, it was about a snake, but that's not the end of the story. That's like a word that your mind used, snake or a symbol. And then from that, you have to look at everything around that symbol. So snake was in a hallway. Now straight away, hallway is very different to an open field for example. Hallway has, you know, one or two directions. You can go forward or back and there's usually doors along the edge of the hallway. So that's a very different meaning to a snake being in an open field or a snake being in a cage, do you see? But your brain assigns meanings to all of that. So yeah, hopefully you can start to realize how complex the question is. It's not as simple as just this simple means this. Now I do have a full detailed blog post on my website which I will link to in the description that covers the 100 most common dream meanings and it explains very specifically how you can actually understand what they mean for you. I've really just scratched the surface here and I do have a couple of other videos like kind of embedded on the article. So I really think you should go and read that and just have a quick browse through. I've got some links at the top which you can hop around to the most common dream symbols including snake and it explains a bit in a bit more detail how that works. So go and check that out and I hope this has been useful in some way.


Item No. SCP-2480 Object Class Presumed Neutralize Special Containment Procedures Dimensional Research Site-13 was constructed adjacent to Bodfell Manor, location of the SCP-2480 anomaly. Civilians are to be prevented from accessing the Bodfell estate through nonviolent means. Class A, B, and C amnestics may be used at the discretion of field agents. Human personnel have been integrated with the community, surrounding SCP-2480 as quarantine or relocation of inhabitants has been deemed unfeasible. Considered the best source of information for SCP-2480 anomalies, agents are to make local inquiries and investigate any rumors, reports, or claims of an anomalous nature. Mobile Task Force Epsilon-6, village idiots, have infiltrated the community in order to remain on a lookout for anomalous manifestations. Mobile Task Force Psi-9, abyss-gazers, is to remain on standby in case of an emanation event. The use of force has been authorized, and anomalous manifestations are to be destroyed without prejudice. Description, SCP-2480 is speculated to be a dimensional anomaly located in ████████. A coastal and heavily forested town with just over 9,000 residents. SCP-2480 was allegedly created by accident when agents from the Global Occult Coalition interrupted a ritual on November 28, 1952. While the true purpose of this ritual remains unknown to date, the Foundation has concluded the anomaly to be the result of the inept and heavy-handed approach of GOC operatives. SCP-2480 appears to be centered around Bodfield Manor, home of the late Cornelius P. Bodfield III. Birth date 1866-1952. Millionaire industrialists with an acute interest in the occult. Prior to his death, Bodfield was the leader of a secret society known as Additums Wake. Dismissed by the Foundation in 1932 as simply being a decadent upper-class social club, their anomalous capabilities were not recognized until the November 28, 1952 incident. Due to the critical failure of their mission, there were no surviving GOC operatives to be properly interrogated. However, documents were subsequently recovered from a GOC safe house located in ████████. It appears that GOC attempted to destroy these documents prior to their mission. A torn report, lower half missing with a photograph attached via a paper clip, was discovered in the back of a fireplace along with significant ash. It is assumed that all other documents had been incinerated. KTE-042-Black Threat ID KTE-0452-Black Grand Carces Ion Authorized Response Level 4 Severe Threat Liquidation Pending Description KTE-0452-Black Hereafter referred to as Subject is a humanoid threat entity of variable appearance. Subject most often appears in priestly vestments and carrying a staff. Subject is able to disappear and reappear at will, shape and manipulate organic material, bend reality, see document 37b, and is hypothesized to be biologically immortal. While Subject is classified as humanoid, they are not believed to be human, whether they ever were is still debatable. Psychological profile indicates malignant narcissism in megalomania. Subject is believed to have aided in the creation of Sarkic cults throughout much of the world. See on Sarkicism for further details. It has been verified that GOC operatives intended to assassinate POI-93. As POI-93 was not discovered among the dead, it can be surmised that the GOC did not achieve their primary goal. The Foundation became aware of SCP-2480 after intercepting and decoding a GOC stress broadcast, prompting sending an investigative team. Thirty-six corpses were found scattered throughout the estate, eight of which were later identified as GOC operatives. All but five displayed anomalous cause of death such as implosion, disintegration, and fatal physical reconfiguration. SCP-2480 is hypothesized to be a dimensional anomaly that cannot be directly perceived. This cognitohazardous effect interferes with perception in such a way that only through the use of perception altering chemicals and or the direct and sustained observation of its effects on local reality, it may be detected. Reality alterations were subtle and restricted to bot-filled manner, manifesting as impossible interior dimensions. Interior larger than exterior would suggest, non-Euclidean architecture, and additional rooms and corridors that did not previously exist. SCP-2480 has been classified as safe. Addendum The investigation of bot-filled manner uncovered disconcerting evidence with regards to Cornelius P. bot-filled a third in the organization known as Additum's Wake. Based on several meticulously kept journals and a collection of photographs, bot-filled and his followers would frequently host orgies that included rape, pedophilia, ritual human sacrifice, and cannibalism. Discovered within the journals were sermon notes and guest lists whose names have included affluent families, respected politicians, leaders of industry, and even those of religious authority. Among bot-filled belongings were the handwritten tome containing religious scripture. His journals frequently referenced his book as the Valxaron. The writing system had yet to be deciphered. The Grand Hall contains a marble statue depicting an entity with a leonine head and a vermaform body. This statue was later studied by Dr. Judith Low, Senior Advisor at the Department of History, Religious GOI Threat Analysis, and confirmed to be a representation of the Demi-urge among certain Gnostic sects. The Demi-urge, also known as Yaldabaoth, Sarclos, or Samuel, has no history of being presented with reverence and is believed to be a figure of worship for Additum's Wake. At the base of the statue, written in Greek, are the words Desire is the measure of all things. Be unbound for moral tethers. Do as you will, to whom you will. In mid-1988, Simon Oswalt, Director of Site-13, failed to send a biannual report on the state of SCP-2480, which had no reported changes since its original containment. The Foundation, believing it to be a bureaucratic error, attempted to contact Site-13 directly without response. Initially, Agent Samuel Rowe and Agent Sarah Valentine were sent to investigate, but neither agent has since made contact, and their fate remains unknown at this time. Mobile Task Force Epsilon-6, Village Idiots, was dispatched to ██████ in order to re-establish contact with Site-13 and properly secure SCP-2480. Members of Mobile Task Force Epsilon-6 were able to successfully integrate themselves into the community as new residents or tourists. Mobile Task Force Epsilon-6 Surveillance Operations Superfluous data expands for the sake of brevity, listing logs relevant to the SCP-2480 anomaly. Mission Log Agent Myron Goldstein, Day 6 Clashay as it sounds, I've been starting to detect a certain wrongness here. Isn't anything I can actually pinpoint to. In another place, I'd probably dismiss this thought immediately. This night I saw a man mowing his lawn at midnight. Strange behavior but not his self in an anomaly, maybe just eccentric. This morning I noticed a man staring me down at the fish market, his eyes never blinked once. There is a smell too, not fish, not the sea, subtle but pungent all the same. Mission Log Agent Adam Grayson, Day 11 I'm not comfortable in this hotel one bit. You can hear people running about at all hours of the night, can't get any sleep.  Last night decided to check it one last time before heading to bed, saw a face, couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman, but as soon as I looked they started to slam their head against the door over and over, over and over, they just wouldn't stop. Mission Log Agent Emma Lightbody, Day 16 I don't know what command is waiting for, our target is body full of state but they stayed their hands so far, maybe knows something we don't. A nervous looking man approached me on the street, reeked a whiskey but his tone was sincere, asked me if I was a fed, lied and said I was, I was able to get some info. Talked about monsters in the fog, screaming their secrets he said, no idea what he meant by it. Said it's been like this for over forty years.  Mission Log Agent Frank Guseppi, Day 20 Fog is thick here, always raining, even the trees look sad, like they're stuck in autumn or something, too much gray, not enough green, the locals don't talk much, seem to keep to themselves, strange for a supposed vacation destination, the majority of folks don't seem to ever smile, look damn tired too, some even sickly. My first weird encounter was today, saw a bunch of kids gathered on the street around dusk. Thought they were playing a game but as soon as they noticed me, they scattered, leaving behind what had their attention. It was a dead dog, looked like a black lab actually, had one of the lad and seeing it nearly brought me the tears, hit my weak spot I guess, I'd seen plenty of human corpses, never felt a thing. That wasn't really the odd part, it would be one thing if they were poking it with a stick, I mean, kids get curious and all, but no, this was different. Poor critter was partially flayed and covered in bite marks, big chunks torn from it. Those kids were having a goddamn snack out here. Mission Log Agent Emma Lightbody, Day 30 Guseppi and I decided to do some exploration, plenty of abandoned buildings to choose from. Decided to check out a two story house by the waterfront. The inside wasn't quite what we were expecting. The interior was covered in gibberish and symbols, odd but not anomalous, another notable detail was in the living room, had one of those tiny screen TVs, the sort you'd see in the 50s and 60s. There were four TV dinner trays, still standing and holding half-eaten meals, decayed beyond recognition. What family abandoned their home and all their belongings in the middle of dinner? Thought we caught a glimpse of someone, chased him upstairs but never found anyone. Many things we were chasing our own shadows. Maybe he was right. We'll check out another place tomorrow. Maybe secure us a proper anomaly. Mission Log Agent Reese Maynard, Day 37 Seven days. Seven days without any word from Guseppi. Lightbody said they had plans to rendezvous an old mill, but he never showed. Did a sweep of his place and found a few things of interest. All the doors were locked, windows too. DNA and fingerprints gathered at the scene and matched no one but Guseppi. The TV was left on. We have nothing to go on, it's like he ceased to exist. Mission Log Agent Harold Mason, Day 39 The others underestimate the dive bar seen in this town. Some think you can't trust a drunk to offer proper intel, but they're wrong. Just have to filter out the noise. Besides, the inebriated seem to be the only honest folk here and easy to bleep for information. Chatted up a cute native, loosened her lips with a few drinks, got nothing of value, at least for regards to information. Converged with an old fisherman, looked like he's seen some rough living. Rambler a lot, started sobbing about lost siblings, said Bodfell took two sisters and a brother, questioned him more but couldn't give him the answer if he meant the estate or the dead millionaire himself. Guess he was old enough for the latter, saw the original report in the mission briefing.  One was delirious by the end, said the town had a God-shaped hole in it. Couldn't get him to elaborate. Mission log, Agent Myron Goldstein, Day 40 Agent Grayson is dead, I can't say exactly what I saw, but it was enough for me to know that he didn't make it. We were having a few beers at the docks, comparing notes. Said he felt like he was being followed. Told him we were all feeling something like that, his eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep, kept twitching too. It all happened so fast. I felt the hairs on my neck rise, the air smelled of thunder, assumed a storm was brewing. I saw Grayson's eyes widened, and in an instant he was turned to slurry, hit by some invisible force. There I was, covered in blood and bile, the small chunks of Grayson spilling into the harbor. Through it all I felt a presence, whatever it was, I think it wanted me to know how easily it could do this to me too. I don't know why it spared me. A crowd looked on from a distance. A few twisted their lips into a plastic smile, but most averted their gaze, lowered their heads and went back to their daily routine. I wish we could just raise this place and have it all done with. Experimental research. Statement of Dr. Calyxto-Norvez. Surveillance of ████████ revealed patterns of possible significance. This includes excessive procreation. The average ████████ household having 12 children, a number unsupported by census data. Approximately 80% of children born over the last 30 years lack birth certificates or social security numbers. Local inquiries have failed to ascertain why this might be. I suspect religious reasoning, similar to the quiverful. Cognitive impairment. Many residents appear to have difficulty with memory retention and subsyndromal delirium, mental fatigue. Subtle hallucinations are not uncommon. Drug abuse. The community appears to consume approximately 200% more alcohol than the statewide average. The use of hallucinogens is seemingly non-existent. Disappearances. The number of disappearances within the vicinity of ██████ is the highest in the state. This has been blamed on geographical features such as dense forests and marshland by local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. The actual number of missing is speculated to be much higher, involving the unreported disappearance of the transients and local residents. Suspicious deaths. Many local fatalities suggest foul play and possibly anomalous causes of death. All such deaths have been recorded as accidental or suicide, even when contradictory evidence has provided the law enforcement. Example. A woman was discovered with her body structurally inverted. This concluded her state to be self-inflicted, although this would be impossible. Apathy. An unusual malaise affects the town, as should readily be apparent from the previous examples of abnormalities. From my experience with SCP ████ and SCP ████, I hypothesize that we are dealing with an anomaly beyond our senses and that of our technology, one capable of creating a facsimile of baseline reality, invisible but not entirely intangible. First access to NN-Demil tryptamine. Previous experiments with human perception have yielded positive results from NN-DMT. A requisition form has been filed and a waste proper authorization. The better explained the reasoning behind my request. In 1976, I was sent to investigate ████, Brazil, a community displaying abnormalities akin to those related to SCP-2480. I eventually came in contact with an indigenous tribe in the southern part of the Brazilian Amazon, a people unaffected but surprisingly aware of the anomaly. Introduced to their shaman, I learned of the aberrations that lurk beyond mortal sight. The tribe had many words for these entities, but the most common could be translated as none stand where they do and were associated with a condition known as soul sickness. They were viewed as distinct from the spirits of their animus traditions, a living wound on nature brought to their land by colonists. Their shaman showed me Yopu and I experienced the world as they saw it. At the time, I merely dismissed it as a hallucination. DMT is commonly held to be a hallucinogen. This is demonstratively false as noted with my experiment with SCP-███. It is a perception enhancer, allowing us to sense that which evolution is strangely seen fit to obscure. DMT, when properly administered, should be able to activate this normally dormant level of perception for anyone. To put it simply, it removes our perceptional filters, though we might perceive reality for what it really is. DMT Testing 1 I, Dr. Narvez, entered a town center at 0900 with an inhaler containing 60mg of DMT and a concealed radio and video feed connected directly to my assistant, Dr. Wu. I intend to use the first hour to observe my surroundings before administering DMT. I inhale the DMT, within approximately one minute I experience a tingling numbness throughout my body. Colors have become more vivid and soon a yellow fog cloaks the town. I see people in dark hooded robes, their outfits appearing to be composed of poorly stitched together leathers and hides. I cannot see their faces and I feel instinctively that I must not look upon them. The majority of locals appear surprisingly normal. They move around or stand aside when the hooded figures approach. Never do they make eye contact. Wu informs me of this odd behavior, noting that the locals appear to be evading something unseen. I continue to explore. I now see that the buildings are in a state of ruin, covered in a pulsating, fleshy material. Wu states that they look perfectly normal to him. I see a drainage system. A black fluid flows through it and carries with it an amber sheen. Wu cannot see it whatsoever. A church in the center of town has been completely replaced by a black ziggurat. The cowed entities prostrate themselves before the structure. I must assume that it holds religious significance. I see a roped entity in the distance. They are abnormally tall and hold several unknown creatures by a leash. I examine the leash more closely. Its composition not unlike that of intestines. The creatures have small, unblinking eyes. Their mouths display several rows of needle-like teeth. Their flesh is sickly pale yet muscular. They jibber madly and move with a frenzied pace. Wu tells me that he sees a teacher with young students, possibly on a field trip. I observe several of the creatures attack one of their own, its size suggesting it to be the runt of their pack. They rend it flesh with their talons and teeth as it squeals in pain. Wu states that he sees several of the children bully in one another. I invert my eyes unable to watch more. I look skyward and see tall spires, composed of a kiteness-like material, towering over the town. I do not understand their purpose. I require proof that this hidden world is real, but must obtain it without drawing attention to myself. I remove a bottle of water from my satchel and consume it before backtracking to where I had seen the strange liquid. Crouching down, I fill the plastic container with the viscous substance. The other world begins to fade and I am returned to reality, the effects of the DMT having likely worn off. I turn my eyes to the bottle. It appears empty to my eyes, but I can feel the weight of the liquid. Never before have I experienced anything like this. Besides the organic structures, I recall seeing black banners with a yellow spiral-like symbol. I felt as though I had seen that glyph before, but its meaning and origin escaped recollection. Lab results. Material became visible after its removal from SCP-2480's hypothesized zone of influence. It is black and reflects light with an amber shimmer. Substance of the liquid, although somewhat gelatinous. Microscopic analysis have revealed organelle-like structures resembling free mitochondria in a particularly viscous serum with high levels of unidentified fatty acids. DMT testing 2 I, Dr. Narvez, accompanied by Agent Lifebody and Agent Goldstein, entered a house that, until recently, was occupied by Agent Giuseppe. Initial investigations showed no evidence as to what might have possibly happened, although foul play is assumed. As was done in my previous experiment, I have a live video feed connected to my assistant, Dr. Wu, and intend to inhale 60mg of the DMT. After inspecting the building, I administer the DMT. As expected, within approximately one minute, I experience a tingling sensation throughout my body. I now perceive the house as it truly is, decaying, covered in excrement and blood. I can smell it, taste it. I imagine this to be what it is like to bite into a tumor. Better to say a rotten tumor. Tumors are just flesh after all. In the living room, written on the wall just above the couch is the phrase, he is dreaming war, at a tumble rise. The meaning of these words are beyond my understanding. There are other symbols, they are in a language I have never seen before, and impossible to decipher. We intend to search the basement. It is an ancient root cellar. On the far end of the large spiral painted on the wall, I feel compelled to inspect it closer. As I draw closer, the wall fades yet the symbol remains as it is painted upon empty air. Through this archway are descending stairs. As I enter, Woo informs me that I walked into the wall and the camera went black. There is no wall, there was never a wall, only a clever illusion. The agents are concerned, they cannot see the way. I tell them to close their eyes and step through as I did. Now all three of us are on the other side. They too see the descending stone stairs. We walk down the stairs and enter a tunnel, into the bowels of the basement's basement. The walls quiver and tremble with life, porous they bleed as sap-like material, contact with Woo is lost, our GPS devices fail us, life body looks to our compass, the pointer whirls and twirls. The tunnel divides, branching out many directions, I choose the path to my left. We walk for only a few minutes before reaching a rotted wooden door, I ask the agents if they are able to perceive it as well. They can. We push the door open and enter, only to exit from an old shack of obviously baseline appearance. GPS shows that we are on the entirely opposite side of the town. Contact is re-established with Dr. Woo. We appear to be in a field of some kind, a yellow fog blanket in the land. Dr. Woo and the agents describe the area as likely abandoned farmland, GPS suggesting that we are relatively close to Bodfield State. I inhale another 60mg of DMT, note, research a way to lengthen the effect, and request that Agent Goldstein takes the lead. I feel a sense of dread, but attempt my best to hide it. I hear heavy breathing, even heavier footsteps. The others hear nothing whatsoever. These notes must be done in retrospect. Goldstein regrettably could not see the threat, and I was too slow to react. I mourn his loss, but must describe the encounter in as much detail as possible. I saw the silhouette of a massive humanoid, estimated to be over 4m in height, as it shambled out from the fog. I wanted to scream but attempted to remain calm, in order to gather as much data as possible. Physical Description Its flesh was pale and flabby.  Entity lacking visible eyes, ears or nostrils. Its teeth and three-fingered hands were heavily stained, seemingly caked in viscera. The entity charged us, loping like a colossal gorilla. I informed the others that it would be best that we retreat, but it would prove too late for Agent Goldstein. The entity lifted him with a single hand, and bit down into his torso, disemboweling him in the process. We serpentine through the fields, unable to find a shack from which we came. I was unarmed, yet I alone had the means to lead. I should have supplied her with DMT, something I deeply regret and retrospect. I could feel the ground beneath my feet quake, casting my eyes downward. I saw not soil, but fragmented flesh, like Harlequin-type ickyosis. With each step I took, the skin splintered and gushed like an infected, pus-filled wound. The ground was soon ruptured with slithering, crimson-colored tendrils. They snatched Agent Lightbody by her ankle, pulling her into a hall far too small for any human. I hear her screams in the breaking of her bones. I ran and never looked back. I hope this is enough evidence. I have no wish to return to that place. Access restricted to Level 4 personnel or authorized Citra-Artra personnel. An introductory statement by O5-4, SCP-2480 is currently projected to lead to an SK-class dominance shift by the year 2030. We will not allow this to happen. Our predecessors blamed the Gullwold Cold Coalition. We assumed as always that we knew better. You have been selected to be a part of Project Citra-Artra. Welcome to the Invisible War. Another world is bleeding into ours, an invasive colonization over iteration of reality. Our soldiers do not experience fear or pain, they know nothing of restraint or mercy. They swirl with rumors, rumors I intend to address. What you've heard is true. Genetic analysis of the enemy has a right of one conclusion, mostly human. Do they come from another iteration of our reality? From our future or past? We don't know. They cloak themselves in a facsimile of baseline reality. They will wear the faces of those you love, forcing you to kill, over and over, the very people you are fighting to save. Every word you've heard about these abomination is, in all likelihood, absolutely true. There is but one common myth I wish to dispel. These aberrations can be destroyed, despite various falsehoods that claim otherwise. Make no mistake, we will not achieve our objectives without substantial sacrifice. You will see friends and comrades die, devoured by behemoths, sundered by the cries of jabbers, torn to ribbons by fiends. Despite your significant training, the survival rate of Mobile Task Force Cyanine operatives teeters at approximately 55% during the first month of active duty, a vast improvement over initial rates of mortality. Flesh is their weapon, ours is technology, innovation, and the wisdom of those who came long before us. So few had the vision to recognize the threat. This is our world. These are our people. We can live for ourselves today, or help secure tomorrow for everyone. Project Citra-Archer dossier, introductory statement. Project Citra-Archer was conceived by the Foundation and Global Occult Coalition in order to contain and eventually neutralize the threat presented by SCP-2480. Mobile Task Force Cyanine, Abyss Gazers, was formed as a joint task force consisting of personnel from the Foundation and Global Occult Coalition. Mobile Task Force Cyanine is a battalion-strength force trained in unconventional warfare against invading enemies through the use of heavy artillery, DMT-enhanced perception, and counter occult stratagems, or COS. Mobile Task Force Epsilon-6 will continue working undercover in SCP-2480-infected locations, collecting data which will then be employed in Mobile Task Force Cyanine operations. This has proven an effective, albeit costly, and significantly dangerous method at preventing the spread of SCP-2480. Please see Document Engagement Protocols SCP-2480-2 through SCP-2480-46 for further details. With the use of DMT, Mobile Task Force Cyanine operatives are able to perceive their targets. After 12 years of clandestine operations, operating primarily between dusk and dawn in order to limit public exposure, suffering heavy casualties, Mobile Task Force Cyanine were able to reclaim Bodfill Estate in Site-13. The apprehension of SCP-2480-1, formerly Site Director Simon Oswald, has greatly diminished potentially neutralized the threat of SCP-2480. Although still invisible to normal perception, SCP-2480 entities in ██████ grew idle, refusing to feed or even defend themselves. It is currently hypothesized that SCP-2480-1 controlled SCP-2480 entities via pheromones, its removal causing set entities to become directionless. Several cadavers were discovered impaled to the outer walls of Site-13. Estimated age of the dead and the style of uniforms worn suggested they perished in the early 1960s. Several examination of SCP-2480-1 revealed significant mutation from baseline Homo sapiens. A vivid section was performed, anesthesia with administered by SCP-2480-1 showed no reaction, although neither did they appear to suffer pain. The subject noted to be absent of all internal organs, save for the brain, lungs, and heart. The brain showed notable deviation, most notably a pineal gland 8 times larger than normal. SCP-2480-1 is currently secured at Arndt Biological Containment Area-14. SCP-2480-1 interrogation, interviewed, SCP-2480-1, interviewer, Dr. Peter Hull, begin log 1430. Hello SCP-2480-1, I hope that you are comfortable. I would prefer you address me as Carcis Carvas. Do the protocol. Carcis Zilzvaz. Don't speak to me at protocol, I know your rules well. State your queries, unwashed one, where I have no interest in your feigned pleasantries. Very well. Although we not yet understand how, the Foundation believes it understands why you disguised the infestation. What was the point of allowing so many to live in the town? Couldn't you have replaced them all? Fresh materials are always in demand. Why would a farmer butcher always pigs? The population must be kept alive and encouraged to breed. Never deplete a necessary resource. What happened to those that vanished? Pigs are clever animals, you know, intelligent and noble, but pork is delicious, smiles. I see, moving on. How long have you had these anomalous properties? Whether before or after your recruitment of the Foundation? It was soon after my appointment to Site-13. Soon after I was made aware of the Foundation's dossier on me. Dohlerd had called me a merciless bureaucrat without known family or friends. Which it said, to be director at the inconsequential Site-13. That is not nearly enough to justify your traitor's actions. You imaginable imbeciles thought it safe. Heh, safe. Please answer the question in regards to your anomaly. A gift from one who saw my full potential. Placing its left hand over his chest, speaking a referential tone. Cool, ion-knit, soul-neck beat those. I don't understand. Speak English, please. As beleak, tone suggests profanity. Ion, our immortal father, breaker of change, his divine shadow, grand carcasses of aditum, lords of the neverment, herb-priest of the blind god, archon of… Ion. That was all I needed. Please do not waste my time with gratuitous titles. Do not interrupt your better. Just obey me and I will have you nailed to the wall with the other heathings. Aditum will rise. Calm down and we'll be forced to.   SCP-2480-1 breaks its restraints, self-amputating its arms in the process, entities squirmed on the floor towards the ballistic glass, security and medical personnel dressed in protective hazmat entered a containment unit, subject as restrained, gagged, and treated for its injuries. Addendum 2480-3 On November 24, 2014, anomalies similar to SCP-2480 were reported in ████ Romania. Investigation is currently ongoing.


Hey what's up folks, in this project we'll show you how we made an emoji keyboard with the Adafruit QtPie RP2040 and the 1x4 NeoKey. Emojis are pretty easy to use on a mobile device, but they're actually kind of annoying when you're on a desktop or laptop. This project takes the macropad approach and lets you press a single key to make those emojis happen. One button press sends a keyboard shortcut, searches for the desired emoji, and then uses the return key to append it. On macOS, the emoji pop-up window lets you pick and search for emojis. Using arrow keys, you can navigate and use the return key to choose your emoji. The Adafruit QtPie RP2040 is the perfect little circuit python board for this project. There's no soldering required and you just connect the 1x4 NeoKey with a Stemo Qt cable. With KL sockets, you can easily swap out the keys for your favorite Cherry MX compatible switches. Our little 3D printed enclosure is a minimal design that snap fits together and keeps everything compact. The Circuit Python demo code for this project, by Liz Clark, uses the NeoKey and the USB HID library. You can customize the key codes and dedicate each one to a different set of commands. Liz put together a code walkthrough in the learn guide so you can get a nice breakdown. There's two different versions of the code, one for Windows and the other for macOS. macOS Big Sur treats the pop-up differently so there's additional delays needed to properly search and pick emojis. A really cool feature is the NeoPixel LEDs will light up a different color for each key and stays lit while the emoji is being activated. This works as a nice indicator so you're less likely to spam the keys, which can definitely still happen. These keycaps are relegionable so you can add little inserts to decorate each key. I used Carter Nielsen's PDF template to print out a sheet of my favorite emojis. Using an Xacto and my Digi Key Ruler, I carefully cut out each square making sure to trim along the inside of the dashed lines. This is a pretty easy way to add that extra level of polish to your project for fairly low effort. Using a full color insert with emojis directly on them is a pretty sweet way to label your key switches. Each keycap is two pieces, the top cover is clear plastic that's not fits over a grey keycap. I found it easy to remove the top covers when the keycap is secured to a key switch. Just fit your fingernail underneath the top cover to pop it off. These inserts are sized to perfectly fit inside the top cover. Once inside it's easy to press fit the covers back onto the grey keycap. They're actually symmetrical so you can orient them in whichever way you like. If you're looking to design and 3D print your project, be sure to check out our 3D models of Adafruit boards and components. Here I'm using a model of the QDPie and the 1x4 NeoKey which features all of the onboard components. They're available on Github so feel free to download them and use them in your projects. To build this project you'll need a few parts and hardware which we have listed in the description of this video and in the learn guide. The 1x4 NeoKey has 4 mounting holes which make it easy to secure to an enclosure using M25 hardware. I like to insert a single screw through one of the mounting holes and then fasten the standoffs while holding them in place. Repeat for all 4 holes just be sure to install them on the correct side of the PCB. Once the hardware is installed just line up the mounting holes on the bottom cover with the standoffs. Like before start with just one screw and work your way through all 4 mounting holes. The standoffs and screws are both really short so the PCB has a pretty low profile when secured to the bottom. I designed a built-in holder for the QDPie so it's easy to install with a little snap fit action. Start by inserting the board at an angle so the PCB fits under these little clips in the corner. Slightly flex the cover to fit the QDPie underneath the second set of clips. This will keep the PCB secured so it won't pop out when connecting a USB cable. Then all that's left to do is connect the Stemacutee cable to the 1x4 NeoKey and plug it into the QDPie. This is my favorite part of the project. The frame snap fits over the bottom cover with the large opening lined up with the QDPie's USB-C type connector. The 4 key slots on the top cover line up with the 1x4 NeoKey and just snap fit into place. You'll want to orient the key switches with the sockets so the pins are going straight into the sockets. Lastly, you can add your favorite keycaps to each of the switches to finish this up. I really like how just about everything in this project is modular including the code, switches, and even the keycap inserts. I hope this inspires you to check out CircuitPython in your next project and share your projects with us on Adafruit's weekly show and tell.


Thank you so much for coming out, and welcome. Welcome to everybody who's online. My name's Martha Lucy. I'm deputy director for research, interpretation, and education, and it is my absolute delight to introduce my wonderful colleague, Alison Boyd, who is going to be speaking tonight about, I can't remember the title of your talk, Art with a Capital A. African Art in the Barnes Collection, a really important topic here. Allie started, Allie is what we call her. You will all get to know her eventually, she's wonderful. She started about six months ago as our first ever director of research and interpretation. She is a specialist in American art and her work also deals with the politics of display. She earned her PhD from Northwestern with a dissertation titled Modernism for America, Negro Art and Primitivism at the Barnes Foundation, 1917 to 1951. So, needless to say, she is very knowledgeable about our history. Before starting at the Barnes, Allie was assistant professor of modern art at Utrecht University, where she oversaw the research master's program. She has held fellowships at the Phillips Collection, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Max Planck Institute in Florence. You will also find two of her essays in our new book. I guess it's not that new anymore. Came out about six months ago called The Barnes Then and Now, which is for sale in our gift shop. Also, I think there's a QR code on the screen. I don't know if you saw that. Anyway, The Barnes Then and Now, a sort of history of The Barnes, a collection of essays. Allie has two in the book, and I believe that tonight's lecture draws from one of those. So, please join me in welcoming Allie Boyd. All right, thank you so much, Martha. It has been such a joy joining The Barnes Your Team and The Barnes Foundation in general. I also wanna thank all of you so much for being here on what is such an extraordinarily beautiful evening. So thank you so much for coming indoors. I will try to stay on time so that maybe you could have a little bit of light when you leave. And as Martha described, what I'm gonna talk about today is an essay that I wrote for this really wonderful book that Martha edited called The Barnes Then and Now, which is really dedicated to revisiting and to tackling the history and legacy of The Barnes Foundation. And so I wrote for it an essay titled Art with a Capital A. That's a quote coming from the scholar Elaine Locke, which I will talk about more, competing systems of value for Barnes's African sculpture collection in the 1920s and 1930s. But before I really get into the meat of my talk, I wanna actually introduce tonight's event with another event. This is another event about African art that happened at The Barnes Foundation. So we can kind of all collectively get in a time machine together, go back, imagine ourselves back almost exactly 98 years ago to March 26th, 1926. It was an event that was convened by Albert Barnes and it was held first at Columbia University's Women's Faculty Club. And then the same event was reprised for a different audience the following Sunday morning in the main gallery of The Barnes Foundation in Marion. So you can kind of imagine this again as we're imagining our way back in time. You can imagine this is the equivalent of the gallery almost directly above us. And in order to kind of try to take ourselves back in time, I brought in this archival photograph of that gallery from 1928, which I think is really remarkable to see with the lunettes without the Matisse mural in them. And I also brought in a more recent contemporary view from the galleries, but these are the ones in Marion just to orient yourselves. So that week of March 26th, 1926, would have been a busy one for the staff and affiliates of The Barnes Foundation. They organized a multimedia event with lantern slide presentations of the Foundation's African Sculpture Collection, a student choir singing African American Spirituals, a lecture on modern European painting and relationships and its relationship to African sculpture, a reading by a contemporary African American poet, and a reading of translated African folklore at Columbia and this all first happened at Columbia University Women's Faculty Club in New York. And then again, that Sunday at the Foundation. And you can imagine when it was at the Foundation, it was set in that main gallery, which was hung with Albert Burns' by 1926, really already quite massive collection of paintings by Picasso, Cézanne, Renoir, Matisse, all these artists that you're quite familiar with. Tending this event in 1926 to talk about and to learn about African sculpture and the collection were some of the people you might expect, kind of usual suspects, the modernist collector. His dealer, Paul Guillaume, a well-known dandy figure who connected Barnes to avant-garde artists in Paris and who had actually just arrived that morning by a steamership just in time to come to the event. Interested white academics, John Dewey and his wife, Alice Dewey, who helped organize the event. So the very famous pragmatist philosopher, John Dewey. Members of the Harlem Renaissance, such as the sociologist Charles Johnson, who would go on to become the first black president of Visc University. At the event were people who you don't usually hear about in these circles. And so people like the choir from, so a student choir from Board and Town Vocational School in New Jersey. And also nine of Barnes's African-American workers who studied art and pragmatism at his factory in Philadelphia and unfortunately I don't have any extant photos of them, so I'm just sort of putting in the factory as a stand-in. And in this small-scale factory, Barnes had shortened the workday by an hour and a half, so the about 20 workers, half of whom were African-American men, the other half white women, could take seminars and he and his colleagues taught on art and pragmatism and had his paintings originally hung on the factory walls. And so he invited and paid the train fare for the African-American workers to come and attend the event in New York. After this event, versions of the talks, the poetry, the African folklore, the modern French art as well as photographs of African sculpture from the Barnes Foundation from the event were then published in the New York-based, very progressive, very kind of cool African-American journal, Opportunity, and the avant-garde French journal, Les Artes Paris. So this event happens and then we can think about the ways in which it circulates out into all of these very different audiences. I wanted to start with this event because it really brings together the three threads of what I wanted to talk about tonight. And so I'll organize this around three parts. So it's thinking about Barnes' African sculpture collection in the context of European, quote-unquote, primitivism in the 1920s and 1930s, the collection in the terms and in the context and its role in the Harlem Renaissance during this period, and the collection in relationship and in the context of Africa and the broader African diaspora. And just moving before I really get into this topic, I do wanna give a historical caveat. We'll be focusing on writing by white African-American and African diasporic critics, collectors, and intellectuals from the 1920s and 1930s. And they used the now dated, the now anachronistic term, negro, to describe African and African diasporic people and art. And so we'll be looking at a lot of material from what was called at the time the new negro movement and what we would now term the Harlem Renaissance. And I'll certainly explore some of the complex ways that this term worked. But I just wanted to position from the outset that you'll see this term quite a bit in quotes as a period term that refers to African art and for African-Americans and that in the period it was being used as a positive term in the context of the new negro movement as opposed to a derogatory term. So I'm guessing that many of you might be quite familiar with the Barnes Foundation Galleries. As probably I'm guessing many of you or all of you know, they were frozen into place at the time of Barnes's death in 1951. And I think as a result of that, they can appear really sort of timeless, entirely fixed in place. However, what I wanna talk about tonight is how African sculpture came into the collection in the 1920s in this moment of really profound changing categories for African objects and all of these different debates about what it meant and what it meant to different people. When Barnes formed the collection, one primary access along which he related objects were the European categories of quote unquote primitive art and modern art. For example, in Barnes's talk for the event, he directly connected what he believed to be ancient African sculpture to modern French art. Formally, he argued that the convex and concave planes, the surface patterns and especially the abstracting treatment of the human body in African sculpture were important precedents and perhaps more importantly for him spiritual inspirations for modern European art. Yeah. Oh, it's not loud. Let me know if this ends up sounding better. Okay. Louder? Okay, great. I will slip over and lead into the mic. So despite the sort of sense of this as fixed in place, from the beginning, viewers structured their own relationships between the works in the collection according to their own visions and agendas. Rather than fix a clear binary between primitive versus modern art, Barnes's collection began a transnational conversation and contestation about art, race and modernism. And what I want to do tonight is to trace some of the threads of where these different thinkers and artists' ideas converged, but also really where they diverged. We can see this especially through the ways that the Barnes Foundation collection's photographs were circulated in this really extraordinarily rich print culture of the Harlem Renaissance as well as that of the French avant-garde and through the Barnes Foundation's own catalog of their African art sculpture from 1926. So Barnes first encountered African sculpture as the, again, quote-unquote primitive correspondent to modern European paintings in Paris in the 1910s through the French art dealer Paul Guillaume. And this pairing of modern European and primitive African art, and again I want to put that in quotes, it really though revolutionized his understanding of art and aesthetics. He made them the two central pillars of his collection in the early 1920s. When the foundation opened in 1925, its original displays consisted primarily of modern European painting in African sculpture. You can see that. So again, if we sort of stay in our time machine mode, if you had walked up the stairs in 1926, you might have seen something like this. These are installation shots from 1927, where you can see the primary objects in the collection in its early stages really were the collections built around African sculpture and modern art, especially modern European art. And Barnes, here's another room, again, you could have seen if you'd walked up the stairs in 1926. And Barnes signaled that African sculpture was fundamental to the very conception of the foundation and to Barnes's hopes for American art by making it the central motif decorating the original building's facade. And again, just to kind of bring us into the present, a similar gesture has been made in the new building by Billy Tien, which you just entered. So you may have walked over at some point today this tile mosaic, which is based on Kenti cloth. And the idea here is that before you even enter into the galleries, before you've seen any of the art in the collection, the importance of African art, the central fundamental importance of it would be announced to you. And so in trying to tackle the question, how and why was African art such an important pillar of what at the time was primarily thought of as a modernist art collection. Today's talk, in a sense, is gonna be more about Euro-American art history than it is about African art. What you find when you go back into these historical documents and into this moment in the United States is that it's a time in which Barnes, especially in conversation with influential African-American intellectuals, was on the forefront of actively working to shift the value of African sculpture in the West from something that would go into an ethnographic museum, into a natural history museum, to what, and he thinks of this as a kind of elevation, although we'll challenge that idea, but this idea that it's becoming art, so that it's an object that would be shifting into going into an art gallery. But even in the 1920s, as Barnes and his interlocutors worked to re-categorize African sculpture in the Western imagination as art, the question still remained open, what kind of art? The 1920s and 1930s are a moment when people are really sort of shifting the categories that they put African sculpture into, so different people give African sculpture vastly different definitions and assign it different values, and as I'll explore over today's talk, you hear it getting turned in all of these different ways, so it gets called an ethnographic specimen, primitive art, it gets compared as being like ancient and classical art, like Greek and Roman art, and it also gets called modern art. These categories and the sets of values associated with them almost always pivoted on two key questions, what and who was African sculpture for? Let's say that although Barnes used these terms primitive and modern as aesthetic terms, these labels were and are deeply ideological. They project and reproduce colonial logics onto these diverse set of sculptures in ways that often obscure their complex histories and networks of meaning. For example, Barnes along with most European modern artists, critics and curators, really insisted that there was an unbridgeable temporal gap between the African sculpture in his collection and his modern European paintings. In Barnes' paradigm, he insisted that, quote unquote, good African sculpture was timeless, that it was ancient, since he believed that contact with Europe was always the moment of its decline. He would say things like, he would call his collection 10,000 years old. Just to be clear, that is definitely not true. More recent studies of the collection show that most of the African sculpture in the collection was in fact made in the mid to late 19th or early 20th century. And I just think this is, you know, I wanna underline that because I think it's extraordinary, the kind of unrecognized irony of this, that it means that the African sculpture is for the most part almost exact contemporaries, actually, to the modern European paintings that they're hung next to. This unravels Barnes' original categories of primitive versus modern, and it can and should reorient our contemporary vision of the ensembles. The African sculpture in the collection was in fact, and the kind of exchanges between African sculpture and a European avant-garde primitivism were in fact often premised on the really quite modern, syncretic spaces that African sculptors were working in this period. In some cases, sculpture in the collection was constructed from materials from international trade or created in response to a European export market. And so I'll just give a couple of very quick examples here. So this mounted head of a coda reliquary sculpture, and this is a work that we'll be looking at quite a bit tonight, is a form that earlier would have been made with local copper, but at the time that this is being made, it was made with imported metals like brass. So this is primarily made of brass, which probably came from somewhere like Birmingham, England. So if we think about this, it's really this nexus where the materials are actually coming first from Europe to Africa, and then the object is going back to, in this case, to Europe. Or if we look at this Jula-Okolanga head mask, which there's a very long history of this form, but by the early 20th century, it had been incorporated into local Islamic practices, as likely used for Karubi dances, which were performed during Ramadan. So it's already sort of occupying this syncretic space. And then this object, like many in the collection, maybe even most objects in the collection, it seems likely may not have been made for a dance or ritual use, but produced possibly for an export tourist market, and that's true of a lot of the objects in the collection. You can see that in many cases, they're slightly unfinished, or you can see signs that they were never actually consecrated, indications that they may have always been intended to be sold to an export market. So much of the sculpture in the collection was therefore created in relationship to new networks and pressures of globalization and modernization in ways that are both similar to and different from the modernist paintings. And I don't have as much time as I wish I did to really go into all of the stories of this, but I would really suggest this wonderful catalog that was edited by the scholar Christa Clark on the African collection, where you can really go into all these really fascinating stories of the objects. What I wanna focus on for this talk, though, is that to contest the meaning and status of the African sculpture in the collection is actually nothing really new. It's in the very fabric of the foundation's own history. Different figures in the 1920s and 1930s, so the white American collector, Albert Barnes, his French art dealer, Paul Guillaume, the African scholars and critics, Charles Johnson and Elaine Locke, the artist, Erin Douglas, the poet, Countee Cullen, and the Senegalese, Sarah, art critic and politician, Leopold Sengor, and the modern South African artist, Ernst Mancaba, all worked to mobilize the African sculpture in the Barnes collection towards sometimes aligned and sometimes conflicting systems of value, and that's what I'll talk about over tonight. And these values both emerged out of that modernist, primitive modern binary, but also from the very beginning, the works of these different people engaging with the collection subverted those terms. Although the relationships between objects in the foundation's art ensembles might, when you first see them seem really firmly fixed into place, I think it's much more useful to see them as always in dynamic tension, as viewers have constantly contested and reinterpreted their meanings and relationships for themselves. So for part one, I will start, where so many stories of modern art start with Picasso. So Barnes started collecting in an art world that often staged African art in what I think we would now find quite troubling ways. It presented it as both a source of fascination, but also terror. And I'm gonna give a very shorthand account of that context using one of the most famous anecdotes. I know I have at least one colleague who's online, who's a Picasso scholar and so I apologize in advance because this is gonna be really a kind of thumbnail sketch of this. But one of the most famous and often repeated events of modern art history is when the artist Pablo Picasso visited the ethnographic museum in Paris, the Trocadero Museum, in 1907, which he described as a dirty flea market. He later recounted his terror of the African sculptures, hostile power. Not, he doesn't talk about, or he's kind of a tricky figure, but he doesn't always talk about what he learned from their formal qualities as the impetus for his extraordinarily famous modernist painting, La Demoiselle d'Avignon, which let me see if I can make the pointer work. I'm not sure if the pointer is working, but you can see very famously two of the figures on the right are portrayed wearing forms of African masks. Like other of the European primitivists, and then he talks about this painting coming out of that experience, seeing African art at the Trocadero. Like other of the European primitivist artists in Burns's collection, and you can think here of a whole range of artists, Gauguin, Matisse, Modigliani, Picasso engaged both formally and conceptually with the abstract visual language that he saw when he first saw African and oceanic sculptural forms. He viewed them as a kind of radical other to this problem, the sense that there was an exhausted classical and academic European tradition, and so artists were looking for an alternative to it, and saw African art as providing that. But in doing so, he tended to emphasize the transformative experience of these works out of vistic power, not their sophisticated formal innovations. Crucial to Barnes, and perhaps even more so to the dealer Paul Guillaume, who bought or procured Burns's African sculpture collection, and co-authored its catalog, the Barnes Foundation's catalog. The foundations, the catalog in it was the idea that African sculpture's primary contribution was to the quote enrichment and stimulation of European modern artists. So Guillaume, Monroe, Barnes, they over and over invoke the language of the senses, stimulation, illumination, energy, and of the market, enrichment and wealth of resources to describe the value of African sculpture. Barnes wrote, for example, in the art of Henri Matisse, quote, the stimulus and illumination with which European artists received a few years ago from the work of African sculptures, long unknown, widened their horizons and brought them new insight and new access of energy. These authors used terms as part of a narrative of rediscovery. Barnes even used the alarming term recapturing of African sculpture in European museums in the early 20th century by modern artists. The transaction in Barnes's artistic economy, however, flowed only one way, African sculpture enriching modern European artists. In a May 1924 article that he wrote for opportunity, Barnes wrote, quote, those artists, and he's referring to Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, Brancusi, Clay, et cetera, acknowledged freely the great debt they owe to the black savage of 1,000 and more years ago. In addition to the defensiveness of the terminology of a black savage, the absurdity of this statement is that, of course, knowing can ever actually pay a debt to someone from 1,000 years ago. The one-sidedness of this exchange is made explicit in both Barnes and Guillaume's insistence that good African art is always quote, unquote, pure by which they meant that the moment of contact with the West was always the moment of its decline. Under such imagined conditions, how could Picasso ever actually pay back a debt that he owed to African sculptors? The art value that African sculpture carried in Barnes's particular economy could thus only really be used to the benefit of European and American painting. The art historian, Partha Mitter, has diagnosed what he calls a quote, Picasso-Monquet syndrome in Western art history, whereby when a European artist appropriated African forms, he was deemed a genius, but if an African artist adopted Western forms, he was called inauthentic or belated. This foundation, Barnes's ensembles both replicated, but they also challenged Picasso's narratives. On the one hand, while African sculpture had previously been shown in ethnographic or natural history museums, Barnes was among the very early and first Western collectors to show African sculpture in an art gallery. He was the first to do so as a permanent, and the first to do it as a permanent display. At the same time, primitivism was always remain central to his thinking. In a sense, it could almost be said that Barnes restaged Picasso's Trocadero encounter in gallery 22. Two of Picasso's painted heads from 1907, both of which were studies for Le Demoiselle d'Avignon, hanged next to figures from coda reliquary sculptures, and flanked the central wall vitrine of African sculpture. As the art historian, Joshua Cohen, has shown, Picasso would have seen, I can, well, I'll show this in the next slide. If I go forward, I can't go back, so we'll wait for the next slide. But, well, actually, I think maybe I can risk it. So as art historian, Joshua Cohen, has shown, Picasso would have seen mounted coda reliquary sculptures at the Trocadero, so this is a display from the Trocadero, and they bear similar features to Picasso's new work from that year. Cohen's careful research is a surprisingly recent and key intervention, since establishing what European modernist actually could have seen mitigates against art history's tendency to really talk, to sort of talk in general terms, to avoid African arts influence by shrouding these relationships in vague generalities. Burns himself often did this, and it's unlikely that he would have known exactly what sculpture Picasso actually saw, but when Burns hung the coda works from his collection next to the Picasso's, he did at least ask viewers to actually look carefully at their formal similarities. Picasso's mask-like heads share this color palette of the coda reliquary's statuaries Warm Brown Wood, its copper and brass assemblage. The painted and sculpted faces are similarly geometrically rendered in quadrants with sharply defined, protruding rectangular noses and circles of concentric convex and concave rings to depict the eyes. Burns created displays to show African sculpture's relationship to European avant-garde primitivism, and in doing so, he created a radically different experience for his viewer than the one that Picasso had. I think in a sense it's impossible not to see that Picasso was deeply formally influenced by things like the coda reliquary sculptures when you hang them next to each other like this. And although Burns's vitrines may now appear old-fashioned, he installed his galleries with the intention of having them be a modern antidote to the darkly lit ethnographic displays that Picasso described at the Trocadero. The coda works are isolated, they're hung on wood and they're mounted, they're really hung as though they are paintings. This radically alters them from their original form as reliquaries. So they would have originally been, had sort of fuller-bodied skirts, which would hold human remains as part of funerary rituals. That's clearly very different than mounting on the wall like a painting. Also though, this way of hanging them though also alters them from the dense installation that Picasso talks about being terrifying at the Trocadero. Made over into art in the ensembles, the coda statuary assemblages served a new modernist paradigm that Burns was promoting. In his view, the art values of ancient African art would pave the way for American art. Burns would later expand his quote-unquote primitive collection to include art as geographically diverse and multisensory as Native American textiles, pottery and metalwork as well as Pennsylvania German decorative art. Burns believed that these again quote-unquote primitive arts could provide American artists with both new abstract forms and sources for energy and vitality. Moreover, these diverse forms, starting with African sculpture, would be a way to train viewers, especially American viewers, for how to properly see and appreciate the new developments in modern art. So if Burns and Guillaume initially formed the collection in conversation with contemporary European artistic practices, it soon became a hub for the ongoing American conversation on art, race, and modernity. And here Burns's most important partners were the cultural writers and editors Charles Johnson and Elaine Locke, both influential members of the Harlem Renaissance. Burns and Paul Guillaume argued that African sculpture had been to modern artists in Paris. So they say, you know, African art was to modern artists in Paris where Greek art had been to the Renaissance artists in Italy. Burns extended this idea to argue that through the influence of Egyptian art, Western art was always already seated with African influences. And in fact, African-American artists and writers had already established a parallel idea for the Harlem Renaissance. For example, just to bring in a Philadelphia artist, in the 1910s and 1920s, the Philadelphia sculptor Medevo Warwick Fuller created works that showed a visual continuity between African, Egyptian, and other classical influences. Burns's campaign to categorize African sculpture as art was of a piece with the concerns of many collectors and critics in the field in the early 1920s. With this new, really sort of sudden, intense interest in African sculpture, many experts were anxious to establish it permanently within the category of art, rather than as simply a passing trend. So Elaine Locke worried, for example, that, quote, having passed however through a period of neglect and disesteem during which it was regarded as crude, bizarre, and primitive, African art is now in danger of another sort of misconstruction. That of being taken up as an exotic fad and a fashionable, amateurish interest. And he says later in the same essay that what he really wants to do is establish African art as art with a capital A. In a moment in which the prices for African sculpture were exponentially rising, the anxiety was that it not be treated within the fluctuating market of commodity fads, but rather the more stable economy of art value. As Locke wrote, again, this idea, he wants it to become art with a capital A, something stable. A 1923 editorial in Opportunity journal of the New Negro, this may have been written by Charles Johnson, although it's unsigned. But the editorial complains, quote, the Museum of Natural History in New York has a collection of African art valued at a half million dollars, the gift of the Belgian government. The Smithsonian Institute in Washington has an equally fine collection which has attracted as little interest. These are tagged and catalogued precisely enough, but meaninglessly. They are curiosities rather than art. Relics of a dead past rather than symbols of the life of a living race. The author here distinguishes how the monetary value of a half a million dollars is meaningless in a natural history museum in comparison to the artistic value, which would be, quote, the symbol of the life of a living race. This editorial depends on two assumptions. One that different types of exhibitions produce value differently. And two, that art value is more important than monetary value. A 1924 editorial in Opportunity that's written about Dr. Barnes, so this is an editorial that's written about Albert Barnes, described the inverse effect of African sculpture in the context of his art gallery. Barnes was and it was the first and is distinctly the last word in primitive African art. And his pieces, the rarest of their kind, exquisite, exotic, distinctive, once casually valued at $50,000, are becoming invaluable. Although the term invaluable implies great value, it also denotes a shift from a market commodity economy where objects are worth $50,000 to a kind of transcendent art economy. In 1924, Barnes described the importance of resting these works away from the anthropologists so that they could inspire art. He wrote, quote, at the critical moment, as Monsieur Paul Guillaume has shown, the treasures of the Negro sculpture were recaptured from the anthropologist and the antiquarian. And from them was derived a new impetus toward creative work in plastic art, in music and in poetry. And what he means specifically there is creative work in plastic art, in music and in poetry for an African-American community. So Barnes, in parallel to the editors of Opportunity, was working to shift the viewer's engagement with a whole range of values that they might attribute to objects and ethnographic displays to the art values that they would see in an art gallery. If these various authors were eager to argue for African sculptures transcendence to the alternative economy of artistic value, they diverged, however, widely on how they thought it should participate in that economy. For Barnes, the art value of African sculpture was established definitively within his scientific theory of aesthetics. In his systematic account of how to see works of art, actually, could you go back one slide? I feel like we should probably be looking at an ensemble while we do this. Thank you so much. So this is how Barnes wants for African art to be established within art value. So he posed his ensemble, for example, in African sculpture, a wrought iron ladle, an oil painting, as all comparable according to principles of light, line, color, and form. And according to this method, seemingly disparate objects became subject to comparison. In this sense, Barnes's gallery space became akin to the capitalist marketplace in which all objects are made commensurate, albeit in Barnes's case by formal properties of analysis rather than monetary currency. These negotiations over art and value are particularly evident in the photography of Barnes's African sculpture collection. In general, Barnes fiercely maintained that it was impossible to understand or appreciate the art in his collection through the medium of his photography. This is something people might know about, but Barnes was incredibly resistant to having his collection photographed. There is one major exception to this, though, which is the African sculpture, which he not only allowed, but also kind of really commissioned and encouraged photography was of. And he actively encourages that these photographs get circulated. The photographs illustrated both Barnes Foundation publications in a range of important African-American and European journals and anthology publications. And paradoxically, this photograph campaign was meant to persuade the public that African sculpture was exactly the kind of hot, important art that should not be photographable in Barnes's logic. As these images were embedded, juxtaposed, and described in different publications, though, they enabled a broad range of interpretations and debates which reflected the Barnes Foundation's own conceptual framing, but also really extended far beyond it. These publications worked as key mechanisms through which authors and artists across the African diaspora, as well as Africa, participated in modernist Europe's engagement with African art, but also remobilized it towards their own, often decolonizing projects and formations of black modernisms. So if we, the standard Barnes collection photographs composition clearly supports this promotion of the kind of high art value of the sculptures. They primarily show the sculptures individually framed against a white background with light coming from the upper corner, and you can see glimpses often of the pedestal that the object has been put on. And these are all conventions established it for photographing European classical art. The individualization and the clarity of the photographs works to visually remove the stigma of objects associated with the clutter of old curiosity cabinets or the more recent ethnographic museums, as described by Picasso and the Trocadero. And what I find just really kind of interesting and important here is that photography serves this important role as in a sense sort of translating and remaking, but you could also argue in a sense kind of appropriating African sculpture into the context of modern European art. It kind of reframes how you see it to look as a kin to the rest of the Western tradition, even though these are objects that would have been used very differently and had very different lives. And as time went on, the position of many members of the Harlem Renaissance diverged from Barnes's. The May 1924 African art edition of Opportunity was the first publication to feature photographs of Barnes's African sculpture collection. And it opens with an editorial that casts the value of these sculptures quite differently than Barnes. An editor possibly, again, Charles Johnson, described the importance of Barnes's collection. Oh, sorry, back a slide. Great. He writes, soon primitive Negro art will invade this country as it has invaded Europe. It is inevitable and there will come with it a new valuation of the contribution of Negroes past and yet possible to American life and culture. And this term invade really jumped out of me when I first saw it. The author's evocation of African art that invades the United States poses the sculptures as active agents rather than as passive objects that are discovered or recaptured by European artists and collectors. The author from Opportunity forecasts a new non-monetary type of value for African sculpture. And yet he's very specific that this value is to provide contemporary African Americans with a kind of cultural capital rather than incur an unpayable debt from white artists. Elaine Locke, like Barnes and Guillaume, argued for a common set of aesthetic principles by which objects could be compared. For Elaine Locke, however, this was so that African sculpture in and of itself could be valued. Locke wrote, quote, meanwhile, as a product of African civilization, Negro art is a particularly precious thing. It is one of the few common elements between such highly divergent types of culture as the African and European and offers a rare medium for their fair comparison. In this passage, Locke mobilized the language of the marketplace as used terms like products and fair comparison. Locke's cultural marketplace, however, is one of exchange in contrast to Barnes and Guillaume's construction of it as a site for enrichment of Western artists. Locke continued to shift towards recognizing the particularity of African art and calling for its more active role in African American cultural life. In a 1926 essay surrounded by photographs of the Barnes Foundation's sculptures, Locke described the modernist, quote, unquote, discovery of African sculpture in Europe. I'm hoping you can see this here. If you look at the middle of the paragraph, Locke, however, uses kind of the ironic quotes around discovered. And he does that to provide a subtle but savvy intervention against Barnes's emphasis on the genius of European modern artists and collectors who, again, quote, unquote, discovered African art. Locke instead shifted his focus to the cultural and artistic value of the sculpture that it offered to Africans, or more often to an African diasporic community. Locke famously wrote that African sculpture, quote, can scarcely have less influence upon the blood descendants than upon those white European modernists who inherit by tradition only. Locke, like Barnes, used an essentializing logic when he argued for African sculpture's special influence on its, quote, unquote, blood descendants, by which he means African Americans. However, he did so to reroute the value of African sculpture from primarily serving contemporary European and American artistic genius, which at the time was often coded as white, to being a generative cultural and artistic inheritance specifically for African Americans. Both Barnes and Locke promoted African sculpture but two different purposes. And I'm going to kind of skip through this a little bit because I wanna make sure that there's time for question and answer, so I'm gonna speed up a little. But I'll just say very briefly that there ends up becoming a kind of clash between Locke and Barnes. When Locke makes plans, they fail, unfortunately, because he starts them at the beginning of 1929. And as you can imagine, the Great Depression gets in the way, but he wants to start his own collection of African art in Harlem. But for him, he really values, what he really emphasizes is the crafts and the possibility to sort of engage with African culture and history and artisanal history through a craft collection. And Barnes very much comes out against this. So Barnes's teacher, Thomas Monroe, argued that Locke's, he has an initial traveling exhibition, was of handicrafts and, quote, deserved neither the word primitive nor African nor art, end quote. And Locke's reply was his most striking rebuff of the Barnes Foundation. And this was after years of actually very close collaboration between Locke and Barnes. But at this point, they diverge.   The distinction did not exist in the culture itself. And recognition of that fact is basic in the competent study of appreciation of African art. And he continued, certainly it is at least as legitimate a modern use of African art to promote it as key to African culture and as a stimulus to the development of Negro art as to promote it as a side exhibit to modernist painting and to use it as a stalking horse for a particular school of aesthetics. So what Locke is saying here is he's accusing Barnes of instrumentalizing his African art collection to use it in the service of promoting his modern art and his aesthetic method rather than appreciating it on its own terms. Importantly, Locke introduced the new possibility of modern cultural uses and meanings for African art rather than kind of keeping it cordoned off as always art buried in a deep past. Locke's accusation that despite Barnes', all of this work that Barnes had been doing with the Harlem Renaissance, that he was using it as a side exhibit to modernist painting, it certainly hit a nerve for Barnes and for people who are familiar with Barnes. Barnes had a lot of nerves. So after the dispute and amid other ones, Barnes granted fellowships. I mean, he was really kind of like, wanted to kind of reclaim his place, his role within the Harlem Renaissance. So he granted fellowships for the African-American poet Gwendolyn Bennett and the painter Aaron Douglas. In fact, and I don't have time to go into detail with this, this could be a whole other talk, but Aaron Douglas, who's a really extraordinary painter from the Harlem Renaissance, actually cited survey graphics special issue, which was created between Barnes and Elaine Locke, Harlem Mecca of the New Negro, as you know, seeing it in Topeka, Kansas, where he was living and saying, I have to get to Harlem. I have to become part of this. And during the years leading up to and after his fellowship studying art at the Barnes Foundation, he would produce some of the most iconic and innovative modernist visual depictions of African sculpture. And in some cases, I can't say this definitively, but he did study for a year at the Barnes Foundation. It seems like he may have included direct references to works that he saw at the Barnes Foundation. I show this here. On the other hand, anticipating a later generation of African diasporic artists who often themselves felt limited by Locke's emphasis on African heritage, the poet, County Cullen, asked a startling different question of the Barnes collection. With his famous line, what is Africa to me? So in this poem called Heritage, which is surrounded by photographs of the Barnes Foundation collections, Cullen traced an African, American man's conflicted relationship to a memory of Africa that was always already embedded in Western contexts like Barnes's art galleries or books. Cullen's poem, Questions, you know, it really starts with this, again, this very famous question. You know, what is Africa to me? I'm African-American. And, you know, the poem describes an African man who does not have access to the same heritage as an African man would, simply by virtue of being black. And Cullen's poem, you know, really sets up a kind of ambivalent relationship between the poem itself and the sculptures depicted from the African art collection at the Barnes Foundation. It shows how the context within which he encountered African sculpture had always already been shaped by the goals and values of modernist collectors, poets, and anthropologists. The poem describes an encounter with African art that unsettles Barnes's idea that African-Americans had an unmediated relationship to African sculpture and also Elaine Locke's belief in its direct potential to inspire African-American artists. So Barnes encouraged a range of artists, students, critics, intellectuals to see his galleries. And what I find really interesting and important here is that in doing so, his collection catalyzed social and creative processes and produced values and ideas that contradicted his own. And just to say, and I promise, I know there's five minutes left. This will be very brief, but I do, although this talk has really stayed very close to the Barnes Foundation itself and its immediate circles. The Foundation's 1926 African art catalog and the many Harlem Renaissance publications in fact circulated far beyond it, where they framed and participated in key transnational dialogues, especially in Africa and the broader African diaspora. Through the photographs, especially the debates about what African sculpture could and should mean as art extended to African and African diasporic artists and intellectuals, as the art historian Joshua Cullen has shown, the black South African avant-garde artist Ernst Mancaba described, he has this incredible description where he described as going into a library in Cape Town in I think 19, I don't have it written down, but I think it's 1936, and discovering a copy of the Barnes Foundation African art catalog and seeing that as his impetus to engage with modernism and in fact to move to Paris. After seeing the catalog, he wrote that he wanted, quote, to participate in the great universal debate where Africa, though present by its ancient sculptural masterpieces in the possession of collectors and museums and in the opinion of so many European thinkers and artists, had nobody to speak to it. In perhaps a surprising parallel to Cullen's poem, Mancaba, an urban-based African artist, also described himself as having discovered African art as fragments recontextualized in the Barnes Foundation's book, but saw this as a chance to grapple with his heritage, which he understood as always already entangled with colonial modernity and European modernism. He used the photographs of the collection to inspire new techniques for pattern and abstraction in his sculpture and painting, and also to himself go to Paris to bring his voice into these debates and to engage with indigenous African cultural heritage, while also, and this is a quote from him, ensuring the international currency of his own visual language. And three years later, in 1939, the Senegalese poet, philosopher, and future prime minister of Senegal, Leopold Senghor, described also having this encounter where he discovers the Barnes Foundation African art catalog, and it becomes central to his own very different thinking. Senghor was a key founder of the francophone negritude movement, which developed in dialogue with the Harlem Renaissance and sought to raise black consciousness. And Senghor has been criticized for sharing the book's romantic and racialized construction of African art, but as the scholar Joshua Cohen has argued, he also used the Barnes catalog and the value that it conferred on African sculpture via European modernism to really center Africa's place within global modernity, to create new, oh actually could you go, well here this is good, to create new conversations across the African diaspora and to stand for a pre-colonial African sovereignty that could motivate an African Renaissance. Artists and thinkers as diverse as Locke, Johnson, Cullen, Douglas, Mankaban, Senghor described the quote unquote discovery of African sculpture on either a visit to the Barnes Foundation galleries or on finding one of its related publications, which premised Africa's sculpture's value on the development of European modernism. But they all used that value of that connection towards their own purposes. The Barnes Foundation's walls may appear static, but when you go into the archive, you discover that this collection and its display, both in person and through photographs, produced not a fixed statement by Barnes, but a dynamic conversation that reverberated across the African diaspora through Europe, the United States and Africa. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Allie. So illuminating. We have time for a few questions. So please raise your hands. I'll just please make sure that you're speaking into the mic when you ask your question. This is a comment. I'd like to see the new Afro-American Museum collaborate. Yes, thank you so much for that. No, I mean, I think that is such an extraordinary opportunity for the Barnes Foundation. I think as many of you might know, a sort of new neighbor for the Barnes Foundation will be the African-American History Museum. And I think we are certainly really excited to collaborate with them, especially because, you know, I think the story of African sculpture at the Barnes Foundation, what I was hoping to get out with this talk, it's a story, I mean, the objects themselves have such fascinating and important, I mean, every single one of them should be its own talk. But it's also a really important story about Philadelphia and New York and the African-American community and the ways that these objects were meaningful to them. So just to say, I absolutely agree with you that it's a wonderful opportunity for collaboration. I'd say this will be a very important and major thing that you can do. And this will involve publications, great long-lasting publications, and good publishing. Thank you so much. I just have a question about the collection itself. Are there pieces that are very, very old? So I would say those sort of, in terms of very old, the oldest piece in the collection, there is a work, a Benin bronze, which is old, so that would be 16th century. Almost everything else is 19th century or later, with the vast majority being late 19th and early 20th century. Thank you. Sure. There's a question way over here, so let me have a minute. I was just wondering if you could talk about the African artists. I was struck in your discussion of value, of who was the money actually going to? Yeah, so I think with value, I do think that this, I would wanna say, and this I think even happens in terms of the value in the African diaspora when we think about the sort of value accruing towards an African-American community, I think you are absolutely right that that is still not value that is going towards African artists. A lot of the objects, I would say, possibly even a majority of the objects in the collection or certainly many of the objects would have been made for a tourist or an export market. So that said, when they went to Paris, they would have gone for much, much more money. So I think that in terms of thinking about sort of the concept of appropriation and exploitation, we can think of that in the context of artistic value, but also I think you're quite right that it's also a sort of really important thing to underline just in terms of monetary value. So my question is similar to what you just said. So a lot of the art was acquired during colonialism time. And so the art, a lot of these countries wants to bring that back to their country now that they are in control because they couldn't control the art leaving their country. And so does it travel to Africa? Does it exhibit go other places? And to my understanding, a movement of art being, these countries asking for their art and are they getting it back? The artifacts that they lost that they could not control to keep in their own country. Yeah, no, that's an incredibly important question. I would say in terms of our collection, I mean, something that is new to the collection in general is that there is now more possibility to travel. So those sort of opportunities, this is new for the collection. So those opportunities for exchange are opening up to some degree. And the object in the collection that that has been sort of most discussed in relationship to is there is, there are three Benin bronzes in the collection and one that's a historic Benin bronze. And those, our curator has been in discussion with those because I think those are, that there's certainly like sort of at the center of those conversations. I think something we were also certainly talking about and that for Martha and I has certainly been a priority is for the objects in the collection. Even if in cases in which if they are staying in place to think about how do we bring in more interpretation around them that can reanimate the original lives of the objects. So things like oral histories, music, dance. So bringing in ways to sort of learn more, sort of bring back some of the life of the objects as they originally would have been used and sort of known and sort of thinking about them as sort of living objects in that sense. I just have a question. Yeah. I've found it really fascinating that a lot of these objects were actually made for the tourist market. I don't think I realized that. I knew that they were late 19th century, most of them early 20th, but I don't, that the people making them were actually thinking of the European tourist market. But my question is, so they're making these sort of contemporaneously, but I guess my question is when did this belief that these or this idea that these objects were a thousand years old or whatever, where did that originate? Yeah, I mean, I think it's just sort of, you kind of realize, so I mean, I mean, I similarly think and this also a little bit speaks to the previous question, which is a lot of these were never, for example, there's sort of a lot of examples in which you can see places of where the object would have been consecrated or oils were never rubbed on it or we have sort of evidence for why we would think that actually, it was never actually made or used to be used in a source community. But I think, you know, your question about, yeah, where does it come from? I mean, how could you think a wooden object is 10,000 years old, right? I mean, that doesn't even, I mean, if you just, anyone in this room sits for a minute and thinks about that, you'd think, well, that's crazy that object couldn't have lasted for 10,000 years, if you think about the material. And I think that really is the kind of power of the kind of ideological work of primitivism. I mean, this idea where this is really developing this premise around the idea that there's a huge temporal gap between this art as the source, as something that is more authentic, more ancient, that is somehow separate from the modern world was so crucial to the ways in which African art was taken up, especially by avant-garde artists, that I think, you know, it's sort of maybe some kind of confirmation bias. I mean, that idea is so crucial that people sort of saw, I think, what they wanted to see and slotted it into that category because it was somehow inconceivable that these objects, in fact, were in many ways just as modern and some art historians, I think, have really provocatively argued even many ways more modern than the modernist works because of the ways in which Africa via colonialism was so at the forefront of all of, you know, the worst aspects of modernity, the pressures of globalization and modernity. So thinking about these, in a sense, is hyper-modern objects. But to my mind, I think it is, I mean, to some degree, they didn't, they know so little about it. So I mean, I will say that, that these objects came into the collections and people really didn't know. But also, to me, it feels like really evidence of just the power of ideology. Thank you so much and thank you all for coming. Thank you all so much.