Me, Greg Tate & Brooklyn: From Bearden and CGI to GenAI
I discovered Romare Bearden the same year I took my first computer graphics class in high school. Bearden merged his love of Black life and jazz with abstraction and collage. I was listening to Public Enemy and noticing how the Bomb Squad made collages out of sampled sounds. In 1992, the year I graduated with a BFA in Computer Graphics from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY and moved to Chicago for grad school, I bought Greg Tate’s “Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America”.
At SAIC I was still into collage, except I had moved from cutting and pasting paper to using software and computers. One of Tate’s essays in “Flyboy” was a 1988 review of Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. He says: “To know PE is to love the agitprop (and artful noise)...” I made several digital collages in 1992 and I also signed up with a music professor who showed me how to chop up and rearrange music samples.
The following year I got permission to do an independent study and moved back to Brooklyn. An art center in Jamaica, Queens got funding so I could set up a computer graphics lab in a housing development. I commuted from Bed-Stuy to Jamaica to teach kids how to do what I was doing on computers. I put “Flyboy” away for a time. Then, a year later (1994) Mark Dery interviewed Greg Tate. In Dery’s essay, “Black to the Future” Greg Tate talks about the embrace of hardware (and software) by Black and Latino youth. He refers to graffiti artists such as RAMMELLZEE and Blade, the latter whose work “looks like computer graphics…”
The word ‘Afrofuturism’ was coined in Dery’s essay, with interviews with Greg Tate and others that captured the birth of a movement. My dream of seeing computer graphics labs in NYC housing developments faded but I continued to set up labs in Massachusetts. I discovered Greg Tate again in the late 2000’s when I enrolled as a PhD student. I created a virtual 3D simulation in honor of “Black to the Future” in 2010.
I was still exploring collage in 2010, except I was immersed in the virtual 3D world of Second Life. Mark Dery, Greg Tate and others talked about science fiction but my work was science (and technology) fact. I was working in virtual 3D and augmented reality (2012). Then, in 2016 I discovered generative artificial intelligence or GenAI. By 2019, I was making at least one GenAI image a day, then posting them on social media. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit I was creating and posting portraits. Some of them made it into a 2021–22 Smithsonian show titled FUTURES.
Greg Tate unexpectedly passed away on December 7, 2021. I used my favorite GenAI tool Deep Dream Generator or DDG and applied the Deep Style method that “painted” a selfie Greg took of himself in the style of three style reference images. Then, I composited them in Photoshop just like it was 1992 all over again, except I used GenAI, too. I posted the result on the same day and something amazing happened.
The chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts or MoCADA reached out to me. Amy was very interested in the Greg Tate image and requested to host it on their wall as oversized vinyl in their soon-to-be sculpture garden. She wrote: “Greg was such a light to us all and I think it would be a great celebration of his work to have it centered in Fort Greene.” It went up in January 2022 and has been up ever since. I’m not sure for how much longer though. Since then many people have taken selfies in front of the Tate mural, including Vernon Reid.
The mural in Brooklyn is another form of collage, with public engagement. In many ways, the MoCADA commission brought me full circle to when I was living in Brooklyn (not far from the mural) studying Romare Bearden, listening to Public Enemy, and reading Greg Tate’s essays in the Village Voice. Artists have used the act of snipping and sticking as a means of bringing the world around into unexpected, transformative combinations on canvas… and now on computer screens, museums, and outdoor walls.