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© 2026
Ari Melenciano

Pelagñou

Pelagñou

Etymology:
Pelago (archipelago of the Greater Antilles)
Ñ (spanish language / Dominican descent)
Nou (Hatian word for plural you, we us)

The knowledge that is between us.

An homage to La Hispañola, Ayiti, Dominican Republic. the Caribbean, the Greater Antilles archipelago.

This work is an artifact of Technoglissant ideologies.

Technoglissant

Édouard Glissant was a Martinican theorist and writer whose work centered on relation, opacity, and creolization. It remains one of the most significant bodies of thought to emerge from the Caribbean. His philosophy challenged the foundational assumptions of Western humanism from within the lived experience of the colonized Caribbean world, and has been foundational for postcolonial thought, Caribbean studies, and anyone thinking seriously about identity and knowledge in a globalized world.

Melenciano's Incomputable Intelligence emerged from her own lived experience, sustained engagement with advanced technologies, and theoretical development through Caribbean and Black American womanist thought. In encountering Glissant's work, she found a clarifying resonance: his frameworks gave language to ways of navigating the world she sensed but did not yet have the language for. Some terms in the glossary extend his thinking directly into the age of AI: mechanopacity carries his theory of opacity into computational systems, créolucence his theory of creolization into consciousness, Pelagñou his archipelagic thought into relational knowledge tools. Others are scaffolding of her own: emerging from her specific practice in relation to cybernetics, consciousness, her body, advanced technologies, her ancestry. She considers mechanopacity, créolucence, and Pelagñou artifacts of a Technoglissant practice: the territory Glissant mapped, continued into the age of AI through the specific lens of Black technoculture.

Incomputable Intelligence

A consideration of the unquantifiable parts of being alive, what eludes the machine.

The Emergent Glossary of Incomputable Intelligence can be purchased on Metalabel.

Last Updated 26.04.22