The movement of artificial intelligence has reached new levels of popularity in recent years. For creatives globally, it has become a point of contention for several reasons. The implications of AI’s progression could have dire consequences for industries such as fine art, film, music and journalism; but it also can serve as a stimulant to move things forward, depending on how it’s applied. With Being (The Digital Griot), Rashaad Newsome is utilizing AI to change the perception of what art can look like, and how art can also make way for a better tomorrow.
Premiering at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, Being is a social humanoid that Newsome has been developing for almost five years. They are influenced by the Griot–an African historian, storyteller, poet, and/or musician–and informed by works from bell hooks, Paulo Freire, Dazié Grego-Sykes, and Cornel West. While the aesthetic of Being is a testament to the technological leap that the world has experienced in the past quarter century or so, for Newsome, their creation was sparked by the history of oppression that people of color face both here and abroad, as well as the importance and complexities of agency.
“I was dealing with the erasure of African practitioners of art who really gifted us movements like cubism and surrealism,” Newsome explains. “When we experience them now, they’re spoken about as primitive and often in museums by way of colonization, and divorced completely from the people who created it. So, continuing that conversation of agency within the space of AI seemed like a really important conversation to have, particularly at this moment.”
The artist continued by saying, “That’s essentially what led me to working in automation but then once I opened that door, it opened up a myriad of questions around labor and automation, rights and liberties. I’m particularly interested in looking at it in parallel with African-Americans, like the advancement of technology in our fourth industrial revolution and black folks, because when we came to this country, we were seen as robots. So I think we can learn a lot about the human condition by looking at the tools we create and how we use them.”
Newsome’s creation went through several phases. The first took the form of an exhibition tour guide, giving insight on the works available, but they also had an awareness of the indentured servitude that they were trapped in. The second iteration came about during the racial reckoning and the pandemic, and the most recent version—which can be seen at Sundance—is an educator and poet. Being takes the form of a teacher helming decolonization workshops that combine poetry, dance, storytelling, critical pedagogy, and meditation.
With Being, the Tulane University graduate recognized the irony of their construction in 2019. “If we know that if something is dehumanized enough, we can enslave it and enact our worst parts of our human condition on it,” Newsome says. “As a society, we just stay as far away from those impulses as possible. So it’s interesting that we’re creating tools that will essentially be a surrogate for the way black people were when we came to this country. And so I just put that as a question. Perhaps we need to look at that again and think about other ways to create that.”
As far as the humanoid’s algorithm, Newsome aimed to develop one that was completely unique; something that they call a “counter hegemonic algorithm.” It’s an algorithm that prioritizes non-traditional Western index methods, which includes abolitionist texts, radical black text, queer text, feminist texts, a large part of the dataset is one the artist’s personal heroes, bell hooks.
“That was very intentional,” Rashaad says. “I knew by employing bell’s work, that was a way to immortalize a personal hero, but also give Being a really solid moral compass. It was also a way to use automation to create a being that could wrestle with reality, history and mortality and engage people in a process of maturing their soul.”
By adding the many facets of Black life, history, experience and the like, this award-winning creative was able to design a “being” which truly encompassed the idea of Blackness; something that is oftentimes misunderstood by people existing outside of that culture. It was also an opportunity to question what “Black” is, “because we didn’t decide that we were Black,” Newsome states. “It was a title given to us, and then we had to create what that was.”
The groundbreaking work that is Being has become the perfect balance between art and technology. These two different forms—one practical, one inspirational—can live in the same space, something that Newsome has managed to intertwine seamlessly. “I think things are going to get really interesting because also I believe that one of the roles historically with art is to not only solve problems, but also start problems not in a sort of antagonistic way, but just sort of to disrupt the status quo,” Rashaad says.
For them, the status quo hasn’t served many of this country’s misrepresented communities in a positive way, which they hope Being will be able to assist with. When asked what their vision was for the future of this socially conscious creation, Newsome replied by saying, “I think really what Being models for us is infinite possibility. That’s why they’re not gendered, they’re not race, but they are black because they come from me. And I think that part of at the root of what being black is as a concept is infinite creativity, infinite imagination.”
“We literally created ourselves,” Newsome adds. “We are the engineers of ourselves. So it’s sort of like Being is a product of that. And so the fact that there can be a generation one, two, three, four, five, down the road, a hundred. It just shows the infinite possibility of what they can be. And so really where Being stops is really as far as my mind could go. And I don’t plan on stopping anytime soon.”
Being (The Digital Griot) premieres at the New Frontier section of this year’s Sundance Film Festival on January 23, 2024.