Kaos Theory - by Robeson Taj Frazier & Ben Caldwell (Hardcover)

About the Book

KAOS Theory: The Afrokosmic Ark of Ben Caldwell tells the story of filmmaker, educator and community activist Ben Caldwell and KAOS Network, the media-arts center he founded in Los Angeles's Leimert Park neighborhood. Through vivid illustrations, archival media, and engaging storytelling, KAOS Theory shows how Ben crafted a life centered around the power of fellowship, community, and the use of art and media as a social force. The text takes a journey through history and time, beginning with Ben's ancestors in the American southwest, up through Ben's childhood in New Mexico, his experiences in Vietnam, his work as a filmmaker and pioneer of the L.A. Rebellion Film Movement, and as founder of KAOS Network. But KAOS Theory is more than just the story of one man's life. It is a work of art, remembrance, and tribute. Encompassing music, film, art, and performance, KAOS Theory honors the vibrant and influential communities that continue to shape the cultural landscape of Los Angeles, the African Diaspora, and beyond.

Book Synopsis

A brilliant, multi-media work about artist, filmmaker, and community organizer Ben Caldwell.

"Caldwell's restlessness of spirit is mimicked in the book's elaborate, frenetic design. It is one of the most beautiful objects I held in my hands this year, a coffee-table book as much as a rigorous monograph, full of archival images, photographs, flyers, and documents telling the story of Caldwell's life..."--The New Yorker

2023 Finalist for Biography, Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards

Finalist, 2023 Golden Poppy Awards, California Independent Booksellers Association

California Book Award Gold Medal Winner for Contributions to Publishing

KAOS Theory: The Afrokosmic Ark of Ben Caldwell tells the story of filmmaker, educator and community activist Ben Caldwell and KAOS Network, the media-arts center he founded in Los Angeles's Leimert Park neighborhood. Through vivid illustrations, archival media, and engaging storytelling, KAOS Theory shows how Ben crafted a life centered around the power of fellowship, community, and the use of art and media as a social force. The text takes a journey through history and time, beginning with Ben's ancestors in the American southwest, up through Ben's childhood in New Mexico, his experiences in Vietnam, his work as a filmmaker and pioneer of the L.A. Rebellion Film Movement, and as founder of KAOS Network.

But KAOS Theory is more than just the story of one man's life. It is a work of art, remembrance, and tribute. Encompassing music, film, art, and performance, KAOS Theory honors the vibrant and influential communities that continue to shape the cultural landscape of Los Angeles, the African Diaspora, and beyond.

Review Quotes

In 1984, a filmmaker and activist named Ben Caldwell established a community art and media center, in Leimert Park, in South Central Los Angeles, that would become known as KAOS Network. His dream was to create a place for young African Americans to build sustainable, self-reliant systems for producing and distributing their art. In the nineteen-seventies, Caldwell had been part of a community of young Black filmmakers in Los Angeles--a movement, which included Charles Burnett and Julie Dash, later dubbed the L.A. Rebellion--and he hoped to empower the next generation of kids to fashion their own alternatives to traditional media. He opened KAOS Network to all: a group of young rappers who would later become known as Project Blowed; videographers and aspiring journalists; Afrofuturist thinkers and writers; drag-ball performers; and also Yoruba Christian congregations, theatre companies, dancers, and artists. Today, collaborators working out of KAOS Network are making games, augmented reality, even autonomous vehicles. "KAOS Theory: The Afrokosmic Ark of Ben Caldwell," by Caldwell and Robeson Taj Frazier, a professor at U.S.C., is a spellbinding book documenting the filmmaker's life and work. Caldwell's restlessness of spirit is mimicked in the book's elaborate, frenetic design. It is one of the most beautiful objects I held in my hands this year, a coffee-table book as much as a rigorous monograph, full of archival images, photographs, flyers, and documents telling the story of Caldwell's life, from his New Mexico childhood, to his military service in Southeast Asia (where he first became seriously interested in photography), to his arrival in Los Angeles, in the seventies, all of it culminating in KAOS Network, and the worlds Caldwell has helped manifest.--Hua Hsu "The New Yorker" (12/5/2023 12:00:00 AM)

About the Author

Robeson Taj Frazier is an associate professor of communication at USC and director of IDEA (the Institute for Diversity and Empowerment at Annenberg). He is the author of two books, a multimedia/film producer, and has published articles and essays about U.S. Black social movements and political ideologies, globalization, fine arts, popular culture, and U.S.-China relations and cultural contact. Frazier's first book, The East is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination (Duke University Press, 2014), analyzes the political and cultural ties cultivated between China and U.S. Black political movements during the Cold War. His second project, It's Yours: A Story About Hip Hop and the Internet (2019), is a documentary film that examines how hip-hop artists' and the broader global hip-hop community's use of the Internet and digital technologies has revolutionized the music industry and global youth culture.