The filmmaker and visual artist places a Black woman's inner life at the center of speculative technology, then asks how a story changes when its audience must move to see it.
The device is not the whole story. In Celia C. Peters's Godspeed, a gifted technophile's invention precipitates a frightening breakdown. That description, published by SFO Museum alongside a still from the project's animated proof of concept, gives the thriller its machinery. It also suggests a more intimate problem. What happens to a person whose competence has organized her life when the technology she made destabilizes her? Peters approaches the future through a character's ability to understand herself. The question begins in the body before it expands into a speculative world.
Peters is an Oakland-based filmmaker and visual artist whose work crosses film, audio drama, digital collage and curation. Those forms do different jobs. Film lets her stay with a character under pressure. Audio makes an occupied world palpable through voices and what cannot be seen. A lenticular print alters as its viewer changes position. A screening program can bring several artists' futures into the same room. Across them, Peters returns to the experience of entering a world that appears familiar until one of its basic rules changes.
Her place in Afrofuturism is explicit rather than an attribution made from her imagery alone. Peters describes her own practice in those terms, as do the California Film Institute and SFO Museum. Yet the label does not exhaust the work. The remarkable feature of her projects is how often an unfamiliar technology or social order sharpens an old human need: to know one's origin, to remain free, to make a choice without knowing its cost.
The disturbance that became Godspeed
Peters has given an unusually revealing account of the beginning of Godspeed. In an essay for the California Film Institute, she remembers walking through Harlem in the early 2000s, hearing music from an open doorway and entering what appeared to be a worship service in a former bank lobby. Two children stood facing a wall, arms extended toward the floor, chanting rapidly. She could not hear their words from where she sat. She left without knowing what was happening. The image stayed with her and became a seed of the story.
The power of that recollection lies in its incompleteness. Peters does not describe receiving an explanation. She describes encountering a scene that demanded one. The physical details are precise, but their meaning remains unsettled: a repurposed commercial interior, a gathering, two bodies at a wall, a voice too distant to distinguish. A filmmaker can respond to such an encounter by supplying an answer immediately. Peters's account points to another impulse, allowing the gap in knowledge to generate a plot. Speculative fiction grows from the discrepancy between what can be seen and what can be known.
The distinction matters for Godspeed. SFO Museum's description foregrounds the cybernetic device and the crisis it sets off. Peters's earlier account of the Harlem scene foregrounds a human reaction to an event that cannot yet be interpreted. The distance between those descriptions is productive. A machine may cause the crisis, but uncertainty gives it dramatic force. The audience must inhabit the interval before explanation, just as a character must.
Peters calls the project a science fiction thriller. Its 2021 animated proof of concept is a scene from a planned live-action film, according to her project page. SFO Museum displayed a still from that animation in Women of Afrofuturism. The project has already moved between forms: a disturbing remembered image from Harlem, a written thriller and an animated screen fragment shown in a museum. Each form changes the audience's relation to Peters's central question about what happens when a woman's own invention disrupts her mind.
SFO Museum's account places the protagonist's technical skill at the center of the drama. Her intelligence is a source of action, not a decorative trait attached to a futuristic costume. The device matters because the person who made it has a practiced way of knowing the world. When that way fails, the film's stakes turn inward. The thriller asks what agency can mean when mastery of a technology no longer protects its maker from the consequences of using it.
Peters's own filmmaking principles help explain the choice. She has said that her work is rooted in classic cinema and especially film noir, with its patience for psychology and the gradual disclosure of character. She welcomes new immersive technology, but her stated excitement is in the meeting of those tools with older cinematic attention to how a story unfolds. It is easy to imagine science fiction as the accumulation of elaborate surfaces. Peters describes a craft of withholding, observing and revising what a character thinks she knows. The screen can contain a cybernetic invention while the suspense remains legible as a change in a person's understanding of herself.
The project's movement between essay, animation and museum display keeps the character close even as its scale changes. A feature film could widen the world around her, but the dramatic pressure is already concentrated in one question: how does a woman whose skill has given her agency respond when her own technology makes her understanding of reality unstable?
A print that changes with the viewer
At SFO Museum, Peters showed another kind of future in The Blueprint. The museum describes three shifting frames and a vibrant afronaut, while Peters's exhibition page shows the work in a digital collage and lenticular presentation. Peters built the image upon a portrait of an unidentified African woman photographed in the early twentieth century by an unknown photographer.
This is a compact but consequential set of decisions. The historical photograph has neither a known sitter nor a known maker. Peters cannot restore a biography the archive has not preserved. She can, however, refuse to let the absence of identifying information become an absence of imagination. A woman recorded in the past is carried into an image of a future traveller. The operation is neither documentary recovery nor a simple replacement of the original. The older photograph remains a visible point of departure, while digital collage gives that figure a different horizon.
The lenticular format makes the viewer participate. Three frames shift with the angle of sight. The future is not disclosed all at once from a fixed, sovereign position. A visitor has to move, and the image changes in response. This mechanism makes Peters's historical argument material. The archive can appear definitive only when the viewer stands still and accepts its first framing. Another position yields another view. A print built from an anonymous portrait becomes a small experiment in what looking can do when it is allowed to change.
The afronaut is a familiar figure in Afrofuturist art, but Peters's use of the source portrait changes its emphasis. Space travel is not merely escape into a distant elsewhere. It is a way of refusing the limits placed on someone whose historical record is fragmentary. The subject's anonymity remains unresolved. The work does not need to invent a name or a life to give her scale. Instead, it places the photographed person in a composition whose futurity is both visual and temporal. The early twentieth century becomes part of a continuum in which Black life can be projected forward without being reduced to what the archive happened to retain.
The museum connects the print to Peters's assertion that Black creativity can move the world. In a lenticular image, that proposition acquires a literal counterpart: movement reveals what a static view conceals. The print makes looking an action with consequences. A person who walks past sees a different arrangement of the frames from someone standing still, and the image's history is disclosed through that change of angle. Peters is interested in worlds whose meaning depends on the audience's changing relation to them.
Placed beside Godspeed, The Blueprint also shows how little Peters depends on a single medium to make that argument. In the film project, a character's changing understanding drives suspense. In the print, a visitor's physical change of position alters the visible image. One is narrative duration; the other is an encounter in space. Both deny the comfort of a future delivered as a finished picture.
The sound of occupation
The audio drama Domesticated takes the problem of altered reality into the ear. Peters's series page describes a first mass contact with extraterrestrials that becomes a takeover. The invaders do not need to announce terms to establish control. Human beings find themselves powerless on their own planet. Aramintha survives and wants to escape a society in which humans are kept as pets. She encounters Jonah, Winsome and Ephraim, three other traumatized people whose priorities do not neatly align with hers.
The premise reverses a relation so ordinary that its violence can pass unnoticed. A human pet is fed or sheltered only within another species' system of ownership. Survival may coexist with confinement; care can be made inseparable from domination. Peters does not have to describe a galaxy in exhaustive detail for the reversal to work. The altered status of the human body changes the meaning of every decision the characters face. Leaving is dangerous. Staying is intolerable. Even a chance to escape may expose what trauma has done to each person's willingness to trust the others.
The four named characters are crucial. A solitary survivor might turn the series into a puzzle about the aliens' capacities. A group of strangers turns it into a drama of competing needs. Peters's description stresses that each has distinct priorities and that their responses to an opportunity for escape surprise them. The phrase suggests that freedom is neither a single door nor a guaranteed shared aim. Their ordeal has shaped them differently. The speculative event becomes a test of relationship, judgment and the limits of solidarity under coercion.
Audio can intensify that uncertainty. Without an image that settles the look of every corridor or captor, the listener receives a world through speech, silence, pace and the characters' interpretations. Peters calls the series a large story told in short, personal segments. Its own credits name Comika Hartford as Aramintha, Charles J. Ouda as Jonah, Dwayne Eggerson as Ephraim and Christiana Blain as Winsome. Those performances are not interchangeable vessels for exposition. In an audio drama, voice carries the differences between fear, strategy, refusal and desire. The cast gives the occupied world several human centers rather than a single explanatory narrator.
Peters is credited on her artist biography as the show's creator, writer, director and editor. The combination matters because audio fiction is constructed in both writing and postproduction. A short episode can leave an event unresolved, move between voices or make a pause feel dangerous. The series premise puts the encounter with superior alien technology through characters trying to interpret one another. The extraterrestrials define the new order, but the human group's decisions give the drama its movement.
Domesticated was launched in 2022, according to the California Film Institute. It extends Peters's exploration of Afrofuturism beyond the image. The question of who belongs in the future acquires a darker corollary: what happens when being present in that future offers no control over the terms of one's life? The series resists an easy equation between survival and liberation. Aramintha has survived; her work is to find a way out, and to decide whether other damaged people can travel with her.
Making room for more futures
Peters's work also includes the arrangement of other artists' work before an audience. The Center for Afrofuturist Studies records her 2019 residency and her screenings, readings and panels devoted to Black science fiction. Her own biography lists FAR OUT BLACK, an Afrofuturist short-film program at Afropunk in 2017, and a West Coast edition at the California African American Museum in 2018. Later curatorial projects include Blackness Revisualized and a film program for the San Francisco Urban Film Festival. These are not equivalent to her films, but they are part of how she works in public.
A screening program has an argument in its sequence. It says that the future can be told by more than one voice and that the voices belong in relation to one another. Peters's repeated return to short film is meaningful here. Short work can be where a filmmaker tests a new visual grammar or builds evidence of a feature yet to be financed. Bringing those works together creates an audience for unfinished or underdistributed possibilities. The curator's hand is present in the selection, timing and conversation that surrounds them.
In her California Film Institute essay, Peters argues for the freedom of Black artists to make work in whatever form they choose. Her point is wider than a demand for representation within existing genres. She wants Black characters and their makers to move across genres without inheriting a narrow assignment about what their stories must explain. That principle makes her curatorial practice continuous with her own art. Godspeed is allowed to be a psychological thriller. Domesticated is allowed to place a fierce survival problem inside a science fiction conceit. The Blueprint is allowed to transform an archival photograph into an image that changes in the viewer's presence.
Krull's Futuristic Dreams editorial used a Stockholm fashion shoot with people connected to the Democratic Republic of Congo to ask how the country's future might be imagined differently. Peters works from other histories and materials: the grammar of noir, the suspense of a bodily breakdown, the anonymity of a historical portrait and the voices of people trying to escape an occupied Earth. These different forms make futurity concrete through what their makers choose to show, withhold and transform.
Peters is attentive to how an audience enters those worlds. A viewer of The Blueprint moves and sees the image shift. A listener of Domesticated has to piece together an alien order from human voices. A spectator of Godspeed is asked to remain close to a woman whose most reliable knowledge has become unstable. The future in these works is less a destination than a disturbance in perception. Peters makes that disturbance emotionally exact, then leaves room for the person watching or listening to change position.