Visual Storytelling 3.0: From Faith Ringgold to NeoAccra
[S]he worked across a breadth of techniques — patchworking fabrics together, plotting out her designs, and painting onto the fabrics, in a process that was at once nuanced and spontaneous. — Katie White
I saw Faith Ringgold’s “Tar Beach” story quilt in a New York City museum sometime before 2010. Since then, I have been very interested in the ‘pieced-together’ aspect of African (Black) American quilt making, as a precursor to my PhD studies when I came up with ‘conceptual remixing’ to replace the problematic term ‘bricolage’. During the Covid-19 pandemic I created a ‘story quilt’ Instructable (D.I.Y. lesson) inspired by Ringgold’s work to teach kids science concepts and address identity or self-concept.
When Faith Ringgold passed away earlier this year I created a portrait of her using Midjourney. I shared the result on social media, as per usual. The image captured her pieced-together quilt making technique, as well as the way Ringgold framed her work with quilted strips of different fabrics. The same quilted elements were applied to the face and hair. The prompt I used was simple: colorful story quilt portrait of artist Faith Ringgold. This is a form of visual storytelling via portraiture.
Visual storytelling tells a story through the use of visual media. Examples include stories told from one individual’s point of view, or from one individual user’s prompting. Prompt engineering is the process of structuring an instruction that can be interpreted and understood by a generative AI or GenAI model. There is a connection between visual storytelling and prompt engineering as human beings that use these techniques has to be effective at communicating something. I shared the Ringgold image on social media, which led to a request from the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts or MoCADA to scale the image up for an outdoor mural that is now on view in Brooklyn, NY.
Originally designed by the artist using AI technologies, the vinyl version of Gaskin’s digital work of Faith Ringgold, which was installed on Juneteenth 2024, stands over 20 ft high. — MoCADA
During a recent Creative AI & Design course for Cambridge, MA teens, I tasked students to use ChatGPT and other visual GenAI tools to communicate messages based on topics of their choosing. I used my own work as an example of how to use ChatGPT to help create the basis of a story. My prompt: 150 word abstract about Afrofuturism 2.0 and AI from the perspective of a b-girl time traveler from the future.
I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web — the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A “Semantic Web”, which makes this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The “intelligent agents” people have touted for ages will finally materialize. — Tim Berners-Lee
Afrofuturism 2.0* combines a certain aesthetic with Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web, which is a new iteration of the World Wide Web. The use of generative AI is a part of this development and I refer to this type of engagement of tools, techniques, and styles as Visual Storytelling 3.0.
What emerged from the collaboration with generative AI was a graphic novel about a character named AYA, Artificial Youth Algorhythm who lived in a place called NeoAccra, a futuristic West African city. I used Midjourney to visualize a story. Whereas, quilts were a vehicle for Faith Ringgold’s GenAI was the vehicle for mine. There are pieced-together aspects to GenAI visual storytelling: prompting based on snippets of ideas and text to create entire worlds with characters, settings, icons/symbols, cultural and personal references. The ideas still come from human beings and GenAI augments the storytelling/visual storytelling process.
*Note: I came up with the term ‘Afrofuturism 2.0’ in 2015, for a book titled Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise Of Astro-Blackness.