The Kongo Cosmogram & Latent Space: Culturally Relevant Machine Learning
One year ago today I visited Casa do Jongo in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as part of my work with the Ford Global Fellowship or FGF. There, we met and spent time with members of Jongo da Serrinha, a social organization that promotes the integration of culture, art, memory, social development, work and income. During our visit, we went into the yard or terreiro to participate in what appeared to be a Kongo Cosmogram, a cultural map from Central and West Africa that serves as a guide for the exploration and analysis of various creative expressions from across the African Diaspora.
Jongo, a rhythm of African origin, is known as a dance of the terreiro with a circle choreography, where participants clap their hands and move their torsos. In the middle of the circle is the soloist or jongueiro, who sings improvised verses and “points”. The letters of the points contain riddles that the opponent in the circle must guess in order to “untie” or “untie” the point. — https://odia.ig.com.b
This was a time of revelation for me because in previous years I researched and published essays about the Kongo Cosmogram (circle) in books ans academic journals. I discovered resonances in Black American art and culture such as Ring Shout, a spiritual dance with West/Central African origins, in which the dancers move in a counterclockwise circle. The dance I saw at Casa do Jongo was very similar to the Ring Shout.
“Wherever in Africa the counterclockwise dance ceremony was performed,” Sterling Stuckey wrote, “the dancing and singing were directed to the ancestors and gods, the tempo and revolution of the circle quickening during the course of the movement.” — https://www.jazzhistorytree.com/ring-shout/
The origin of this performance is the “Big Bang” that created the poetic graphic interpretation of the Dikenga cross, also known as Yowa or the Kongo Cosmogram, an ancient symbol of the Bakongo physical and spiritual realms, is known to have been used as a site for communication, knowledge sharing, and creative expression. These expressions (data) are compressed into a information-rich cultural space (circle) with hidden codes. Codes are used to safeguard and sometimes conceal important messages. Codes can also be used to translate and understand new concepts or ideas such as artificial intelligence or AI.
Kongo cosmograms (dikenga) comprise information (i.e., symbols or codes) that serves as ciphers, maps, or organizing principles for communication, creative expression, and interaction. Dikenga is described as a quartered circle or diamond, a seashell spiral, or a cross with solar emblems representing the four moments of the sun. A person stands upon it to engage in a ritual or to signify that he or she understands the meaning of life. — Nettrice Gaskins
Like Kongo Cosmogram, Dikenga or big circle, latent space (in machine learning) is multi-dimensional. Learning about the Dikenga helped me better understand how latent space works. I realized that the counter-clockwise movement around the big circle represented life and the accumulation of knowledge (spiritual, moral, intellectual or genetic potentialities) or data. This movement is captured in a V or “Vee” that, graphically, looks like a beam that is open on one end and reduces to a point on the other end.
We seek for ideas and images through “the open beam of the Vee”… and on the contrary we focus details and specificities under (the) reverse beam of the “Vee.” — Kimbwandende Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau
Generally speaking, in machine learning (latent space) we train models to transform more complex forms of raw data (ex. ideas and images) into simpler representations which are more convenient to process and analyze. We develop and use AI-powered tools to turn higher dimensional latent space representations into representations that we can visualize or hear (understand). In most diagrams that represent this process, the open end of one side (Vee) is for data input and the other side (Vee) is for output.
The Vee… is a living pyramid in constant motion… The closer one is to center… the more powerful one is. — Fu-Kiau
At the center of the Kongo Cosmogram and latent space is code. According to Fu-Kiau, people of the African Diaspora have lost their closeness to center of the “community cultural ‘Vee’” but we can also see how this plays out in ICT-related fields that includes AI or GenAI where there is a widening digital divide. Today, we can be at the center of AI development to address long-standing justice-related challenges in ICT, including helping historically marginalized people find utility in GenAI toward the issues that matter in their lives. David Odafe Okafor designed, developed, and evaluated AfriML, a web-based platform integrating African cultural elements for ML education. John Pasmore, the CEO and Founder of Latimer.ai, built an AI-powered platform that enhances the representation of Black and brown histories and cultures in large language models.
These examples underscore the importance of culturally relevant educational tools in making AI and ML (especially in education) more accessible and engaging for people of the African Diaspora, recommending broader inclusion, web and mobile application development for improved accessibility and language processing capabilities, among other things. Not to mean, for better representation in GenAI for art and entertainment.