Here, Now & Then: Black Joy & Generative Artificial Intelligence
In the fall of 2016 I spoke at Yale University for the “Aesthetic Activism” symposium that was convened by designer/architect Mark Foster Gage with the goal to explore “emerging positions that cast aesthetics as the primary discourse for social, ecological, and political engagement.” Later, I was invited to write a book chapter that was based on my talk for Aesthetics Equals Politics: New Discourses Across Art, Architecture, and Philosophy.
Gaskins notably embraces Gage’s interdisciplinary vision in her consideration of the Kongo cosmogram which ‘triggers the aesthetic response’ (152)... Gaskins’s compelling analysis of the space in which art, music and folklore meet provides relevant cultural commentary to a Western society where racial prejudice somehow remains a contentious discussion point. — Caitlin Cronin
The focal point of my talk, the Kongo cosmogram (Yowa), charts the universe and suggests the process of the continuity of human life via the interaction between the realms of the living and the realms of the dead. The cosmogram is a tangible indication all aspects of life including joy, which is a deeper emotion than happiness that comes from within and is connected to a sense of purpose and meaning.
Inspired by my Yale presentation, an artist named Carrie Schneider returned to Houston, Texas to work with Susan Rogers of the University of Houston Community Design Resource Center on a national grant from KABOOM! to add more spaces of play to urban environments:
The timing of the grant overlapped the shooting of Terence Crutcher and the election of Trump. We sat down with the teens and said “Look, I know it’s absurd to think about play right now. It is actually less absurd to imagine having space in outer space and in future time than to imagine play right here right now.” So we introduced them to Afrofuturism. — Carrie Schneider
Afrofuturism and architecture have proven to be a fruitful combination. Back in Houston, Carrie and Susan recruited and worked with local teens from a Houston Housing Authority complex to design “Afrofuturist play interventions such as painted sidewalks and a re-configurable 4D basketball half-court stage.” Adaptability or the quality of being able to adjust to new conditions and transformations are important themes in design, especially for historically marginalized groups.
My favorite photo (above) is of three Black boys leaping through one of the OX4D Plays installations, a painted sidewalk that includes a cosmogram. I included a couple of the images in my Aesthetics Equals Politics essay. The same year OX4D Plays made its debut I discovered Deep Dream Generator or DDG, a generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tool that I still use to manipulate digital images in order to adopt the visual style of another image. In 2021, I used DDG to create a tribute portrait of the late Greg Tate.
The Tate portrait was part of my “Gilded” series of AI-generated works. My rationale for using this method was to adopt “shine” from antique, gilded tapestries to generate tribute portraits, just as it had been done in the past using gold leaf or gold paint. Then, I read an essay by Thomas Kim about how certain effects could be used to enhance darker skinned people. The Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts or MoCADA requested to use the Tate portrait for a 25+ foot mural that lived in their Ubuntu Community Garden for 2 years. It was also projected on the back wall at Lincoln Center and it was part of a tribute processional at a City Parks’ SummerStage event.
An aesthetic response includes its resulting experiences, such as what one selects as an expression of preference (DeLong, 1998).
The AI-generated Greg Tate tribute portrait fostered a range of emotions that included grief and sadness but also joy. Similar to what happened when OX4D Plays was installed, several joyful interactions with the work occurred. I wasn’t joyful when I made the image using DDG but it became part of Tate’s ‘celebration of life’ in the general community.
Many kinds of body language can be seamlessly integrated into visual and aural communicative techniques... Such systems include… a variety of symbols and traditions that are incredibly rich sources of cultural and social histories, religious beliefs, myths, and other expressions. — Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz
In 2021, I was part of a three-woman team who received funding from Mozilla to create Web-based app using pose estimation to celebrate Carnival, engage Black and Caribbean communities, and showcase how GenAI can extend Black creativity and joy. Pose estimation (also called PoseNet) detects the position and orientation of the human body. Users of the app can dance with shapes, paint based on their body’s movement, and dance with a mini version of themselves.
Later this week when I present at the Black Joy AI Summit in Washington, DC I plan on talking about how these GenAI projects can create opportunities to foster joy in Black communities.