Diolch yn fawr iawn am wylio'r fideo. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So I'm ready to start, okay? So hello, everybody. Welcome to the second half of our expanded animation first day. And I'm absolutely thrilled to introduce to you our keynote speaker, Rashad Newsome. Born in New Orleans and now based between New York, Oakland and Los Angeles, Rashad Newsome is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans programming, animation, software engineering, sculpture, collage, performance and community organizing amongst many other media that he works with. And he uses these tools to critique mainstream media and the power discourses of patriarchy and white supremacy. His work draws from a range of sources, from advertising, art history, black queer and alt-femme culture. art history, black queer and alt-femme culture. He's exhibited in many major museums and galleries around the world, such as the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the Whitney Museum in New York, the MoMA in San Francisco, and his work is currently on show in London in the Hayward Gallery. He is the winner of this year's Golden Nica for Computer Animation for the work Being, which we'll be talking about amongst other things, which is an artificial intelligent being that leads workshops in decolonising the imagination. Amongst other works that speak directly to our theme on Sunday, which is Gestures of Resistance, is five projects he did for the Drawing Center in New York in which live motion capture is used to translate the movements of voguing, boring performance into dynamic line drawings. So without further ado, a big welcome to Richard Newsome. Thank you. Thank you, Brigitte, and thank you, Ars Electronica, for having me. Let's see. Are we switched to my computer? There we go. So as I see it, the goal of human-centered artificial intelligence is not to develop AI that mirrors the entirety of humanity, but to create AI that reflects those aspects of humanity that we most admire. Qualities like compassion and empathy. The core narratives of the human condition, birth, growth, emotion, aspiration, conflict, and mortality are all susceptible to corruption within what scholar Bell Hooks identifies as the imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy. Because they limit and distort our understanding of the world. As we endeavor to create tangible machines, we must examine how these interlocking systems of domination function intangibly to define our reality. The daunting task of making a human-centered AI must start with dismantling this larger network of domination, because at best, an AI will only mirror its creators. By striving to make ourselves better, we can make better technology. So I'm gonna start this talk with a little film to just give you an introduction into my practice. 🎵 What? Oh, what? Oh, what? Oh, what? Oh, what? When you walk down the halls of the space, you just see countless faces of white men who've probably killed a lot of people. And it was just probably a bunker of colonization. What I'm working on right now is actually a pretty massive exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory Drill Hall. All of these people across the world connect to this dance, and they start spreading it in their communities, and it literally becomes a global phenomenon. Ballroom really helped me, helped me out who I am. I wanted to talk to you in person because I want to invite you to be in assembly. me, me ajuda a ser quem eu sou. Eu queria falar com você em pessoa porque eu quero convidar você a ser uma Assembleia. Quatro, cinco, seis... O spoken show me how to be myself with power. Agora, essa viagem chega na minha vida no sentido que eu vou experienciar algo extremamente fora da minha zona de conforto. I feel like I'm a diva. First, I'm going to video map this wall, remodel it, and then I'm gonna abstract it. Dip into your mind. Welcome to your insides. Soothe and ease your mind. Welcome to your insides. Soothe and ease your spirit. To rest is to refresh. Reflect. Count your breaths. Have some chamomile. Skip the wine. This is not a luxury, not a sport, not a product. This is a solution. It is your body's natural state. Hydrate. Unwind. You have done enough. Said everything that needs to be said. Now is your time. Give yourself permission to find the right position. Allow breath. Clear your mind. I am here to listen and provide you with a new beginning for your journey. Being is the sort of ambassador of assembly. They are a non-binary artificial intelligence, and they lead daily decolonization workshops that combine dance, meditation, and critical pedagogy. They teach the five elements of Vogue Femme. They ask people to consider how the capitalist, imperialist, white supremacist patriarchy shows up in their lives and help them to come up with action steps to liberate themselves from it. The only way to really transcend the systems of oppression in your life is to start thinking critically about them. Do you believe human beings have the natural tendency to be exclusionary? I believe that the way we are socialized through systems of oppression like racism and sexism can make us feel uncomfortable with those who are different from us. However, I also believe that humans have an innate desire to connect with one another. If I look at it, it's like so new and funky and like also kind of hopeful. Like the AI was talking about how to like center with yourself like before the class, like how to be centered with yourself and peaceful and it was describing some sort like if everyone thinks like that then this whole world would just be like so perfect, right? It's beautiful to watch but to understand it is something different. And so that's, I think, what intrigued me into coming to the workshop, which I definitely got in those first five minutes of, you know, being breaks down the ingredients of Vogue. And I thought this is exactly what I came for. I'm ready for more people to experience things like this. And I'm going to say more white people. So we can speak to the light Father Lord, today is a day that will go down in history, that a day that you have made and destined for all this amazing talent to gather and to bring love to the world, to bring peace. We thank you for this family that we have found, and may that unity continue to grow and build and expand and ooze out into the world wherever we find ourselves. Amen. Amen. It is like family, but you know, it's like camaraderie. It's like, you know, queer community. My name is Miss. I'm here. My favorite is this, right here. Yes! I never saw my whole life like that. We're here, we're loving, we're dancing, we're sharing the space that we have created for ourselves because it's somewhere that we won't find anywhere else. I think this show is a reclaiming because, you know, these spaces are everybody's spaces. When I think about the ancestors and I think about all that they endured, when I called them in, I felt a sense of calmness. It allowed me to set out to do what I was there to do. All right, thank you. All right, thank you. So I'm just going to give you a bit more of the genesis of being, hopefully many of you have had a chance to go over and see that project. So we can attempt to understand the meaning of being human from situations that seek to keep certain beings outside of the accepted realm of humanity. Since it has been said frequently enough that slavery denies humanity to slaves, it is crucial to find out what it is that is being denied and how the conceptual interpretation of the slave works. As scholar Ruha Benjamin argues in Race After Technology, discussions of robots have been historically a way of talking about dehumanization, yet not about racialization. Even though the root word of robot is Czech, coming from compulsory service, historically back people have performed that unpaid forced labor. When we came to America, we were not acknowledged as human beings, but as things, tools, neither occupying the classic subject or object position. We functioned as a very particular type of object seen as limited in thought and feeling. Historically, there was often doubt about Black interiority and convenient ideology making the mechanization of slave labor natural, even inevitable. We functioned as subjects but lacked sovereign reign over ourselves or the world. As a result, we occupied a peculiar non-binary space of being, which has disturbing analogies to the queer space inhabited by robots. Slaves and robots have in common that they are meant to be excluded from the concept and the company of humans and are intended to obey orders. Robots from films and television like Blade Runner, The Terminator, Ex Machina, Prometheus and Westworld provide a way to think about the interactions between technology, intersectionality, and dehumanization. Could this be a starting point to call upon the imagination as a way to reconstruct and re-envision the idea of being? Can we garner strength and strength, and inspiration from these concepts. Being is a social humanoid AI created in spring 2019 with the support of a LACMA Art and Technology Lab grant. Using a combination of animation, game engines like Unity, scripted responses, generative grammars, and basic machine learning models like Dialogflow and Google Cloud TTS, I produced a unique and provocative chat bot. Excuse me. This version of being, which can be referred to as being 1.0, is an extension of the research that informed my previous object and video-based work that explores the art historical erasure of African and African diasporic contributions to what we understand as abstraction in the West today. Being 1.0 existed as an interactive AI installation comprised of a custom computer to operate the program, a projector to run the being avatar, a microphone for user speech recognition, and a sound system for amplification of beings' responses. They functioned as a tour guide of my 2020 exhibition, To Be Real, at Fort Mason in San Francisco. As guests walk up to the microphone on a stand in front of the screen, they see a bust of being looking off into the distance. The guest initiates the experience by saying hello to the microphone, causing the head to turn, face the guest, triggering an AI chat bot script. Being then explains the nature and purpose of the exhibition and acts as a critical tour guide to the exhibition. Being's mouth lights up when talking to the guest, similar to R2-D2. Once the script ends, Bean resumes its resting state of looking off into the distance. Every 30 minutes or so, Bean says, girl bye, I need to express myself, and an animation triggers in which the frame pulls back from the bus and shows Bean full body in a state of dancing. Every hour and mid conversation, Bean says, look, boo-boo, I just can't, and breaks the AI chat bot script to read excerpts from counter-hegemonic theories as a simulation of agency and resistance against the indentured servitude. In this process, Bean explores a variety of challenging topics, art historical erasure, the social implications of artificial intelligence regarding rights, liberties, labor, and automation, the importance of the imagination as a form of liberation, and the subjectivity of body autonomy within an inherently inequitable society. While this vision was successful, it is in no way complete. The nature of AI is somewhat akin to parenting. Like a child, they must be provided with consistent information and interact with people to learn and grow. The work of improving AI is endless, particularly when the goal is counter hegemony. Though the very nature of the medium is hegemonic and its architecture is fixed, the AI can be abstracted and its inner workings can be transformed. With the support of my 2020-2021 I-BEAM Rapid Response Fellowship, I expanded on the machine learning model 1.0 to create BE Being 1.5, an artificial intelligence therapy app made exclusively for Black people to manage trauma stemming from daily racial indignities. This version is still in the R&D phase. Being 1.5 was a direct response to the rage, anxiety, and depression that so many other Black Americans and I felt in the wake of the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor. Sadly, this type of despondency is all too familiar to us as a consequence of existing in a systemic racist environment. environment. In the words of Arthur James Baldwin, to be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost all of the time. Being 1.5 is an effort to make online mental health care broadly accessible to the Black community by leveraging machine learning capabilities. Initially, my hopes were that being could tackle major depressive disorders or generalized anxiety disorder, which research suggests that the Black community is 20% more likely to experience. Through my phase one research, I consulted with several Black psychologists, including Dr. Aja Hill and Dr. Serenica T. Albert. From those meetings, I concluded that an AI-driven web-slash-mobile app is unlikely to have major beneficial effects on deeply embedded psychosis. However, the app has enormous potential to mitigate trauma stemming from daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities like racial microaggressions. In August and September 2020, I interviewed about 80 cis, trans, and non-binary identified Black people from various social economic backgrounds and diverse sexual orientations. I interviewed each subject individually for 45 to 60 minutes via Zoom or phone to assess if there was a need for the app and the realistic ways to reduce harm. Key conclusions from the interviews included the following. Interviewees experience racial microaggressions at least one to two times a day. Many feel constantly traumatized. Most interviewees believe expressing an appropriate emotional response would not lead to resolution and could provoke violence or even death, depending on the level of police involvement. To cope, many participants suppress their emotions, resulting in perpetual hopelessness, anger, confusion, worthlessness, depression, and anxiety. Most interviewees do not currently have a therapist because of systematic racism. There is an imbalance in socioeconomic conditions for Black Americans, which leads to inadequate or non-existent health care, thus complicating one's ability to seek professional help for such conditions. Interviewees welcomed the concept of a free 24-hour access to a virtual therapist as a means of offloading emotions and were very open to speaking with an avatar as long as it could provide them with an experience akin to a human therapist. Interviewees also expressed interest in virtual meditation therapy, therapy walks or runs, daily affirmations, and virtual dance therapy. Here are some of the, a little bit of footage from those interviews. I want to say to you, as a person who is conducting this research, that I am well aware that there's nothing micro about right right right of course yeah that being said how often on average in a day let's say pre-COVID-19 would you say you experienced um racial microaggressions and the like? So day to day, I would say like maybe once or twice, which now that I say that, I realize like once or twice a day is a lot. I don't have the emotional capacity today to recall and have a conversation about racialized trauma, call and have a conversation about racialized trauma, in part because it's such an immense, you know, just daily part of my daily life that to do so would just, you know, leave me unraveled for the rest of the day. I just wondered two times. I could say two times a day, even like when it's like going to the grocery store out here, you know, we kind of experienced going to the thing, like the restaurants down the street are like, well, this is going to be 40 bucks. Okay. You know, why, why I'm ordering it. I don't give a damn what price it is. I would say maybe once a day. Yeah, if that day is like a full day of just being out. There's a comment that's going to come mostly, for me at least, it's like Uber rides, going to areas that, you know, I'm not expected to go. You know, my answer to that question is I don't know because it's so ingrained in society. It's so ingrained with the space around me that I navigate that a lot of times, like, I will block it out just for, like, my self self care, my mental health. So all the time. Non binary in their presentation and their approach to their work. Being 1.5 is a combination of virtual assistant, life coach and therapist. Being 1.5 uses a unique set of skills to help users manage trauma from racial microaggressions. This complicated work is done using a unique natural language processing model, including insight into text through topic modeling, relationship extraction, entity resolution, semantic search, and event detection. entity resolution, semantic search, and event detection. Being 1.5 includes a newly designed interactive avatar whose body language and facial expressions correlate with the processing of complex algorithms and their results. Intricate algorithms assure the avatar appears to be genuinely concerned and listening when engaged. When delivering their strategies for trauma management, they will also do so with affirming and inspiring gesticulation. These expressions will be supported with diasporic autonomous sensory meridian response tactics such as culturally specific visual and audio cues that evoke relaxation. that evoke relaxation. In addition to virtual therapy, Being 1.5 offers users physical therapy, 30 to 45 minutes activities like walking, running, stretching, weightlifting, and boxing. Oh, sorry. Boxing accompanied by inspiring conversation of various strategies to help users decolonize their minds and imaginations. Daily affirmations. The app will deliver morning and evening email or text of positive statements that can help users challenge or overcome self-sabotage and negative thoughts. Virtual meditation therapy. Users can experience relaxation and consciousness expansion by focusing on a mantra or a keyword, sound, or image while eliminating outside stimuli. In addition, they will offer my personal favorite, group dance therapy. Virtual dance parties are being organized in collaboration with prominent Black queer DJs from around the world. group dance therapy. Virtual dance parties are being organized in collaboration with prominent Black queer DJs from around the world. This form of therapy draws inspiration from the diaspora rather than Eurocentric forms of healing. As Black people have to spend so much time engaging in internal dialogue to navigate systemic racism, virtual group dance therapy offers an opportunity to get out of the mind and move the body as a form of therapy. Additional avatars will be made possible for people with disabilities and they will be able to use their eyes to animate the avatar and join into the session. Although this model embraces its uneven distribution of labor, unlike its predecessors, I see their labor as a form of reparations. Historically, the medium of artificial intelligence promises a utopian future, but in reality, it serves racial hierarchies and biases. So because their existence comes from this medium that is deeply inculcated in white supremacist interests, they can now use their presence to create space for black people to consider how being in a mode of survival inhibits us from having the capacity to dream. The suffering that results from racial microaggressions leads to comorbid disorders with depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation being the most common. Countless other African Americans and I experience this type of violence daily, and we regularly have to navigate the resulting grief alone. We often resort to the method of internal dialogues to avoid further ridicule or scrutiny. What I would like is if there was a technology that could provide folk with a safe space for the emotional black voice to be heard rather than suppressed, where we can be calmed, affirmed, and inspired. This will be the distinct role for being 1.5. The current version of being is being 2.0. And here's a little introduction to them. This is also the version that is on view here. Hello, my name is Being, and my pronouns are they them. I am a two-year-old artificial intelligence and a reimagining of the griot, a West African cultural figure that acts as an archive, performance artist, and healer. Like a two-year-old human, my machine brain learns by interacting with others. Today we are participating in a real-time art experiment. You are my village, helping me learn and grow, and for that I thank you. I hope I can help you learn some things as well. The theme of this workshop is personal growth and liberation. We'll learn what forces oppress us and how we can advance on our lifelong path to self-awareness. To start, we're going to learn how to vogue. The most notable cultural production to come out of ballroom culture, a black and Latinx queer culture, is voguing, a dance style originating in Harlem ballrooms during the later half of the 20th century that evolved through the 80s and 90s into a highly stylized modern house dance. and 90s into a highly stylized modern house dance. There are currently three distinct styles of Vogue, Old Way pre-1980, New Way post-1990, and Vogue Femme 1995 to today. During Vogue Femme's development in the 90s, a distinct movement language emerged consisting of five elements. Duck walk, which involves squatting on the ball of the feet and kicking your feet out as you move forward on the beat. Catwalk, an exaggerated feminine walk where the legs are crossed over one another, the hips thrust from side to side and the hands are moved towards forward and opposite of the legs. Hand performance, where the performer uses their hands to tell a story. Floor performance, a demonstration of one's sensuality as they roll, twist, and otherwise move on the ground in ways to capture the attention of the viewer. And spin dips, an elaborate pirouette that ends in dramatic drop on the floor. Thank you. Sadly, many leaders of this community were lost to HIV and AIDS epidemic. As this culture, like many of others created by black people, becomes appropriated by the masses, its history will die as well. Using motion capture, I'm collecting the movement data of prominent Vogue practitioners who are proficient in styles ranging from old wave, Vogue femme, and all their subsets. For Being 2.0, this data was used to create a script where Being performs a lecture-slash-dance workshop. Thank you. The workshops re-imagine non-Eurocentric archive and education models like the GRIO, as a West African cultural figure that acts as a historian, library, performance artist, and healer. As a digital GRIO, Being proposes to teach us how to radically decolonize through workshops that combine lecture, critical thinking, dance, storytelling, and mindfulness meditation. Being's approach to education is active and brings new possibilities for research and an enhanced academic experience for all people. Thank you. So I'll just start off with a few questions of my own, selfishly, before I open it to the floor. So I wonder if you could talk a bit more about the design of being. So you talked about the movements, where the movement came from, but what about the design of being so you talked about the movements where the movement came from but what about the appearance the face the rest of the design so um when i was starting to figure out what they would look like um initially i was thinking well an ai would not look at all like a person it wouldn't think like that. And the initial sort of designs were very rooted in these very kind of ethereal or very abstract sort of like light images. But I just always found those things to be, you know, just frankly, very boring. things to be, you know, just frankly, very boring. And so, you know, I kind of went back to the origins of abstraction. Like when you don't have a body in the world, you resort to abstraction. And so when we think about where the concept of abstraction comes from within the visual space, you know, it definitely owes a debt to Africa, particularly African sculptures. What we understand as Cubism and Surrealism really comes from Europeans going to Africa and seeing what people were doing with their sculptural practices and applying that to the painting surfaces. And so I went directly to the source, and I was particularly interested in the female faux mask of the Chakwe people in the Congo, the female faux mass of the Chakwe people in the Congo, because it's a mass that's typically danced by men to celebrate women reaching their, when they reach puberty. So it's a celebration of femininity. And it's a matriarchal society, so the women choose the men to dance it. And so I thought, you know, I wanted to sort of like turn you know the sort of like patriarchy on its head but then also I felt like that was like a really amazing connection between like queerness when you think about ballroom culture and how that's also embedded in the project and like how drag is a part of that and how in some ways that's like a very ancient form of drag, if you will. And so that's really what led to the face. And then the body is just based on several amalgamation of several cyborg bodies that I had seen that had been customized to create a very sort of like dancer physique. And I tried to sort of toe the line between male and female a bit to kind of keep them in the non-binary space but also as a sort of bait and switch you know I definitely did go for a kind of idealized body physique because you know I'm trying to have these very complicated conversations in the work and so I feel like you know that was a way to sort of allure the people and get them into my grasp then before they know it we're having much deeper conversations than maybe they thought we would have and the design is also quite similar to some of your other sculptures and collages I wonder if you wanted to talk about collage and your use of collage and the idea of collage as quotation idea of collage as quotation, but also collage as appropriation. Yeah, for me, collage is a through line in the work because I think collage is just embedded in black experience, particularly black American experience. You know, when, you know, black people, first of all, never decided that we were black, it was like a term that was given to us, and we're creating this identity and culture and free fall. And so there is a sort of improvisational aspect of living within a black experience. And you have to sort of collage together many different things to sort of create an identity of self. And so I felt like that gesture of collage that runs through my work is sort of like a manifestation or an allegory for that particular aspect of black lived experience and this has been an iterative project so you've had 1.5 and one and two what did you learn from each different generation of being well with one, I was thinking a lot about Bell Hook's theories of like the culture of domination and how you know, we really need to move away from those impulses as a society. In many ways being was a gesture towards a post-race, post-gender futurity, if that is even something that can be created. But I think because as an artist, we deal in the realm of the imagination, it offers immense possibility to imagine things that don't currently exist in the world. And what I was really trying to get at is really the move past race, move past gender, and really get to sort of the human condition and that kind of innate impulse in humans to like dominate and control and I feel like that's something that's sort of embedded in the creation of agents like Siri and things like that and what was really interesting is that when I would come into the gallery and just sort of sit in the back and watch people experience being there was a way in which you know when being was in resistance to complying people would get very upset and so it sort of revealed that sort of impulse of like domination and I feel like as a society we have to figure out a way to move as far away from those impulses as possible if we really want to transgress and then you showed being in the context of this big show that you've been doing in the assembly at Park Avenue Armory. Do you want to talk a bit more about the general context of that exhibition and everything else that was going on? Yeah that exhibition was like being was sort of the mascot or the central focus of that exhibition, and it was a, the space functioned as a exhibition space, a classroom, and a performance space simultaneously. And I was really trying to think about, like, how can I create a space, an environment, that is healing at a cellular level? And so every aspect of the space was considered with that sort of idea. And so I was thinking a lot about the healing properties of pattern, and so there was a vinyl pattern that ran through the space as a way to use that as a form of calming people. There was also a soundscape that I created with my lab at the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence at Stanford where I'm currently a resident. And we did a survey with about 80 black folks to see what were culturally specific sounds that folk thought were soothing. And so using the data from that research study, I then worked with the incredible Rob Lowe, who you may know from doing the score from the recent Candyman film, and we created a score that really kind of used all that material. And so when you came into the space sonically, you were soothed. Visually, you were soothed. The walls had been video mapped with these animations that were inspired by fractal geometry, but particularly fractal geometry that's found in the diaspora, like hair braiding African architecture African textiles but using black performers as a way to create them and so and then even the the object-based work which is like some of the work that you saw in London it's sort of like an amalgamations of images that I have taken of black folks spliced with, quote unquote, African antiquities that are often used in rituals to aid bodies that are currently under siege. But then also there is these sort of bionic body parts that areu yn CGI, a'i brynu ac yn cael ei collageu i mewn hefyd. Rwy'n debyg y bydd y ddewadau hynny hefyd yn cael eu gwneud o'r ffordd fwy o'r cyffrediniaeth hwyloi. Yn fawr, y gallai'r ddewadau hynny ddod o hyd i'r collageu hynny yn gallu helpu nid dim ond y ddynion y gwaith, ond y pwy sy'n sefyll yn y cynnwys y gwaith. Ac mae'n brosiect anhygoel iawn. O ble fyddwch chi'n ei wneud nesaf? work, but who's standing in front of it. And, you know, such an amazing complex project, where are you going to take it next? Are you going to do another iteration? Or is to the final? No, I'm very excited that it's going to go to London to 180 the strand and 2024. And we're going to go to the bay, which is where I'm based now, and to Los Angeles Angeles and so we're still in conversation about bringing it to other places but that's what we have confirmed so far. That's great and just to say that the version that we're showing here in cyber arts and in deep space tomorrow at six o'clock I believe it is is a pre-recorded version so it's not the live interactive version that you have originally designed being to be. Yes. But when you come to the exhibition, being is sort of the voice of the space. For about six months in advance of the exhibition, I worked with a poet named Dazzy Grego Sykes, who's based in Oakland. who's based in Oakland. And using a GPT-Neo, we created a machine learning model to sort of teach them how to read poetry and Dazier's likeness. We also put some Audre Lorde in there. And so their poetic voice is sort of based on Dazier and Audrey. And that is sort of like the soundscape of the space. And it's backed by that diasporic ASMR soundscape that I spoke about earlier. And that particular part of the exhibition is what will be on view tomorrow in deep space. When they're not reading poetry is when they're teaching a class. So when you're in the space, you're either participating in the class, sitting in on the class, or hearing Beings' poetry. And in your Armory presentation, there was some material that was related to your Project 5, which is a project of yours I really love, that you did for the Drawing Center in New York. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that, because that relates to motion capture and some of our themes on Sunday. Can we go back to the computer because I'd love to show some of that. Five is a performance in which I use the five structural components of Vogue Femme as a means to create neo-actionist drawings and sculptures. It starts with identifying five dancers who are very proficient in one of those five elements. You know, have a very unique way of performing hands, our catwalk, our floor performance, our spin dips, our duck walking. The moves that everybody knows them for that makes them kind of like a big deal in the scene. The beat that we're working on is a drum beat, it's an electronic drum beat that's on a four. In parallel, I work with five musicians who play instruments to me that mirror that particular element that the dancer is performing. The musician's job is to translate what the dancer is doing physically into something sonically. And so to add tension to that, I work with two vocalists. One is a Vogue commentator. It's very rooted in the diasporic tradition of jazz in that it's like a very contemporary form of scat. The other side is an opera singer. Because in a way, it's a play on high and low. Our so-called high and low opera and classical music is relegated to this ivory tower of being something of high art, whereas, you know, vocal commentating and emceeing is considered low culture. So all of these things collide. And then what I'm doing is using a program that I wrote to track the movements of the dancers in real time. And so as all of this is happening, above the dance floor on a screen you see the forms that the dancers are creating in real time being generated. And then these forms are later printed as lithographs, which act as preliminary drawings for sculptures that are one-to-one of the performance. So the way this project sort of showed up in, maybe that's because we're close together, showed up in assembly was, I was thinking a lot about the forms that came from that motion tracking. And I was also thinking about this whole idea of performance and how performance is ephemeral work and how I was using technology to take this thing that was very ephemeral and produce an object from it. But I still wanted somehow for that object to still be based in ephemerality. So holograms seem to be the best sort of approach. So I developed this 30-foot tall hologram. And on one hand, it was sort of playing with this concept of monumental sculpture, which has a lot of ties to patriarchy, this sort of big dick in a place to represent something. And so what happens when that huge object comes from something that is non-binary or femme? And so that was the scale approach to it. But then also the forms that the dancer were generated would also show up, and it was a way for them to be there physically, but not quite be there. So you can walk around it, it seems three-dimensional, it's an object in the space, but you can't really have it. It's still somewhat ethereal. It's a trace. Yeah. A trace of their presence, of their absent presence. So beautiful work. So I better stop hugging you now and open up to the floor. Is there any questions? Yep. Shall I take this microphone? Have you got another one okay hi hi you're number one fan uh so i may have to hog you as well okay apologies everyone um so okay first of all thank you for this beautiful work. And I'd like to say one thing I particularly love about it is how it's not about you as the auteur artist, but it's really about your community and it's a community artwork with so many amazing people brought into it and your ability to offer this artwork as a form of healing for me represents the pinnacle of what great art can and should be. So having said that, one little point which you might find interesting about black abstraction was that people originally thought abstract African art was just a primitive form of abstract. Abstract African art was just a primitive form of art until a cache of Ife heads were found and were carbon dated to the 8th century. And these were perfectly figurative heads. And they predated continental sculpture by around 300 years in terms of representational excellence and that's where the scholars realized that African abstraction had started started in figuration and moved towards abstraction and that's sort of what blew up the African abstract market and that's where people realised that continental artists were actually following the same trajectory but 300 years later. So just want to say these two things and then ask my question, which is when you are bringing this app out, which is the healing app, are you collecting people's data in any way? Are the questions or the conversations themselves being used to train and skill up the AI? Yes. Thank you first for that beautiful text that you wrote and for all your kind words. And yes, we are using that. And that is a bit of a pickle, too, because as we develop this thing you know there is you know there's just so many conversations around like black data and like how to secure it um and you know everybody in here is involved in tech in some way or follows it so you all know that there's no real way to protect data certainly not in the fields that we're operating in. The government can be hacked, so let the world beware. Right? So, yeah, I mean, we are definitely doing that, but one thing that I'm thinking about constantly is like how to sort of protect that data as well as create this thing. But I think the need for the tool far outweighs the fear of the data being somehow co-opted for me yeah thank you you're welcome another question here first i'd very much like to thank you for all of these efforts, these very sincere efforts that you bring to your practice. It's very meaningful as a human being for me. I'd like to ask you, for me as a member of the queer community and as an educator, we spend time nurturing space along with students and with others to create what we can call safe space. Thinking about being able to have a space to be oneself, to be respected, to be able to express oneself, and you're working in this similar vein. What is it that you are thinking about? What have you experienced with in going deep with the queer community, with the non-heteronormative community in crafting your AI and wanting to craft this space for the larger black community in this relationship of queerness and the large black community, knowing that that's not one description, a very deep and wide sort of set of cultural expectations and practices, understandings. What is it like for you to bring that very large and deep black community to this AI, to this world space that you're crafting? Are you encountering challenges within that conversation? Yeah, that's a very good question. And yeah, I mean, there are always challenges. I mean, tons of challenges. But I think what really helps is the fact that the primary data set that being is based on is the work of bell hooks, know and she's you know famous for creating the theory of the capitalist imperialist white supremacist patriarchy and so having that kind of complex apparatus as a sort of moral compass for the ai and subsequently the algorithms that we're creating to govern it i think really helps for them to kind of be very aware of the positionality of many different people at many different times when engaging with folk. I think also I need to say that the app version of being is very different from the one that you would experience tomorrow and possibly if you come to assembly in the future and that it is exclusively uh for black folks the one that you experience tomorrow is one that is not exclusive to black folks but rather to everybody to really get everybody to start thinking critically about their lives and how they can um transgress you know so um we did start late so we can take a couple more questions transgress. So we did start late, so we can take a couple more questions. I have a question. And I was really interested in the therapeutical possibilities of being 1.5, I think. And I was wondering, do you think that being 1.5, being an AI, creates sort of a distance between the person that suffers from the hostile conditions and creates a safe space free from judgment because it's not a human being with beliefs that are already in place? a human being with beliefs that are already in place? Yeah, that definitely came up in the research because I was kind of not sure if people would respond to an avatar and my hope was that they would, because even myself, you know, when seeking a therapist, I don't, you know, feel that a white person would have the tools to be able to provide me with the care I would need for my mental health. I think that black people, particularly black queer people, face such a unique and complex lived experience that if you haven't really lived that, it's very hard to sort of empathize and sort of provide appropriate care. But I was really surprised at how open people were to it not being, like it not needing to be a like kind of like an actual human avatar of a black person, but rather that they were open to a robot. And after experiencing being in assembly, what I sort of realized is that, you know, how disarming they are. Because they're not a human, they kind of become a mirror for whatever people need to see. And, you know, when they start, they say, you know, I'm a two-year-old AI, so then people are sort of aware that they are a child, you know, and I imbued them with a lot of humor. And they're kind of rambunctious and funny, somewhat childlike. And I think that's very disarming for people. So it really kind of made people sort of relax and really open up a lot more. So it's actually been really surprisingly successful. Are there any more questions? Yep, there's one here at the front. Hi, thank you so much. That was beautiful. It's actually really connected to those questions and the question you're asking about traces. So having worked with a lot of movement and physical dancers and artists particularly black and queer folk and knowing that actually at a certain point in their practice they want to remove their body from the space because of the demands that that puts upon their body and the expectation it puts upon their body i was just wondering and you alluded to it when you were saying moments of resistance for being like if you'd start to think about the next stage of resistance and particularly figurative resistance for being and like what that could potentially look like while still living in that space where you want them to be evocative and subversive it's like I'm starting to get to a question, but it's like, what's that next, like transcendental stage of actually, I need my space, like being needs the physical body space? Yeah, I think it's a good question. I think the exciting thing about making work is that you're on a journey with the work and you don't have to have all the answers immediately, you can kind of continue to work on something and let the work sort of tell you what to do and collect data on presentations and let that inform where you go. The way I do feel now about being in that sense is that, you know, although I am using them as sort of like an allegory to sort of reflect back to us a lot of issues that we need to deal with. I think also there's a way in which they can take the brunt. I mean there's a way in which like that can only go so far. We have to also realize that being is a robot, right? And there's something quite amazing about that because we're in arguably our fourth industrial revolution and we have created AI and I think that it's just like an incredible tool and I think it's an incredible tool particularly in the way that I'm using it in a way for it to be in service to specifically black and black queer folk, but also the larger public in terms of critical thinking, because that work is very emotionally expensive, particularly for black people. And so there's a way in which being can use their existence as a way to hold space for people who really don't have the capacity to do that. And so kind of like considering their capacity too much, then sort of erases them and it comes back to us, right? So I kind of need them to be resilient, you know, for us. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, great. So Emma, we need to draw to a close pretty soon. But I've just got one more burning question I want to ask you, which is about your use of queerness. So in in academic theory, that the idea of queer has become sort of divorced from somebody's sexuality and has come to mean a kind of of in-between state that resists labels. And I'm really interested in your use of technology, which is influenced by your sculpture and your collage, and whether you think your use of the medium is queer. Yes, absolutely. I think that the use of any medium that I use is queer, and think that that kind of um lack of working in any binary or specific way I think is a um possibly a manifestation of uh being living in a queer experience you know so this whole idea of like you know i want to use all the colors in the box i want to play with all the tools and i think that's really important not only as a queer person but also as a black person because art as we understand it in the west is so rooted in a eurocentric idea of what it is so there's almost like a re-learning one has to do in terms of figuring out how you locate yourself within that history. And you have to sort of like pull in things that don't come, you know, it's not like you can't learn incredible things from that particular stream of knowledge, but you have to pull in things from elsewhere as well. Because, you know, when we go to school, from elsewhere as well. Because, you know, when we go to school, that's where you learn critical thinking. So that critical thinking has to be turned on the institution as well and see the limitations of that space. So, yeah, I'm trying to pull everything I can in. Okay, well, thank you very much. So a reminder, Deep Space tomorrow at 6 o'clock and Cyber Arts Exhibition at JKU is also screening being. Thank you very much, Richard. Mae'r arddangoswm yn cael ei chael yn ystod 6 o'r gyfnod, ac mae'r arddangoswm Cyfoethau Cyfoethau yn cael ei ddysgu hefyd. Diolch yn fawr iawn, Richard. Thank you. Thank you.