The Ethics of the Remix: GenAI in Public Space
When I started to think about AI as a tool that we could use to look at the past and not to the future, it became such an approachable and human way to invigorate the imagination. If you really think about it, using AI in this way is like being a disc jockey. You’re mixing Patti LaBelle with A Tribe Called Quest, and you’re coming up with all this new shit. It’s like a remix.
This quote is from an interview with “social practice artist” Norman Teague who used Adobe Firefly, an “ethical” AI image generator, to reimagine design history. In Designer’s Choice: Norman Teague — Jam Sessions, the artist created AI-generated images that are shown alongside objects from the NYC Museum of Modern Art’s collection, to “foreground the voices of people of color and women, and the cooperative, inventive spirit that guides his studio.” According to Adobe, Firefly was developed to prevent the training model from creating content that infringes copyright or intellectual property rights, and it was designed to be commercially safe.
This new era of GenAI art (and design) creation is much more participatory and less focused on ownership. At the core of the remix(ing) process is having the ability or skill to remix almost anything into almost anything else. This process raises ethical concerns — putting together unrelated content, taking things out of context, failing to disclose sources, and hiding one’s identity while doing so. This process is what is driving “remix culture” or the ever-growing ability of people to take apart, stitch together, organize, and edit all kinds of information and media content, essentially making their own new “product” out of preexisting content. However, remixing is also a common response of creators who are overlooked or undervalued.
People have been remixing things for centuries. When enslaved Africans were forced to abandon their own languages, rituals, and ways of being/working/doing and adopt foreign ways they adapted by remixing these systems. In the 19th century, enslaved Africans developed the cakewalk as a subtle mockery of formal, mannered dancing practiced by slaveholding whites. The enslaved would dress in handed-down finery and comically exaggerate the poised movements of minuets and waltzes. Underneath the mockery was the ring shout, a religious dance that follows the movements around the Kongo Cosmogram. In other words, practitioners hung on to what was prohibited by combining original practices or rituals with foreign or new ones.
Many of the stylistic elements of the ring shout laid the foundations of Black creative expressions developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including rap/hip-hop. James Dewitt Yancey, better known as J Dilla (or just Dilla), was a groundbreaking music producer and beat-maker whose inventive contributions to rap and electronic music have left an enduring impact on the world. In the book Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm author Dan Charnas notes how the young, under-resourced producer meticulously tampered with the inner workings of cassette decks to in order to adjust the speed and loop (sample) various sounds.
Later, Dilla mastered the use of machines such as the AKAI MPC 3000 that allows producers to remix existing music by sampling sequences, assigning them to separate pads and triggering them independently, similarly to playing a traditional instrument such as a keyboard or drum kit. Dilla’s MPC 3000 is in the permanent collection is on view at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C. Seeing it on display in its case makes one wonder what would happen if remix artists could become part of the exhibit. What would happen if an artist like Thomas “Detour” Evans displayed one of his ‘conductive’ paintings next to Dilla’s machine… and museum visitors could interact with Evans’ painting the way Dilla did with the MPC 3000.
If we follow the practice of remixing we might find Mikal Hameed’s “Eames Hotrod Boombox” sitting alongside Charles and Ray Eames’ “Lounge Chair and Ottoman” at MoMA. Like Norman Teague, Hameed was compelled to remix an iconic design object. Teague’s and Hameed’s works demonstrate symphony that, according to Daniel H. Pink, refers to the capacity to synthesize, see relationships between seemingly unrelated subjects, and to invent something new by combining elements nobody else thought to pair. Generative AI tools such as Adobe Firefly makes this process easier, as evidenced in Teague’s Jam Sessions at MoMA.
Returning to Teague’s Jam Session, more specifically his AI-generated “MoColor” chair that includes elements of Nick Cave’s Soundsuits we can go deeper to discover African dance costumes and rituals. We can juxtapose Teague’s “MoColor” and Cave’s Soundsuit, with the Egungun Masquerade Dance Costume on view at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. The Egungun masquerade honors the Yoruba ancestors, and the masked dancer becomes the ancestor, spinning and twirling to send the colorful panels flying out in all directions, giving “breezes of blessings.” Under the hood of the more modern artifacts are rituals, practices, or methods that have been devalued or undervalued in dominant culture.
As noted by Norman Teague, generative AI can “reinvigorate the human imagination.” Additionally, GenAI can amplify the practices of remixing, giving underrepresented artists and practitioners access to emerging technological practices and methods. Embedded in their GenAI prompts are guides or blueprints to an evolving culture that was built on remixing (and reappropriation), as a method of creating and for survival. Up to this point, all of the artifacts mentioned here are by men with the exception of the cakewalk and Eames chair that included women as partners.
Faith “Aya” Umoh, a Nigerian-American artist-technologist, is using GenAI to remix the practice of Ekombi, a traditional dance amongst the Efik people of Calabar, Cross River State, Nigeria. The dance’s movements are inspired by the waves and motions of the ocean tides. Barbadian dancer and researcher Valencia James works with technologists and scientists to create collaborative performance pieces that blur the boundary between GenAI and human performance. Vernelle A. A. Noel using a generative adverserial network (GAN) to remix elements of Trinidad and Tobago Carnival such as Canboulay, which is their culture’s version of a ‘ring shout’.
In 2021 I was commissioned by the Smithsonian to create 11 portraits of ‘featured futurists’ including Floyd B. McKissick, a Civil rights activist turned developer who secured funds to build a predominantly Black Soul City in the early 1970s. The AI-generated image of McKissick that stood alongside museum artifacts was created using neural style transfer, a method that takes two images — a content image and a style reference image (such a map of Soul City) — and blends them together so the output image looks like the content image, but “painted” in the style of the style reference image. Each AI-generated portrait I made stood next to museum artifacts (the futurists’ contributions). This was/is a new kind of remix practice, which has emerged from abstract, multi-dimensional space.