Rashaad Newsome works at the intersection of creative computing, social practice, and abstraction. He consistently pushes the boundaries of his material knowledge through his projects and maintains a rigorous commitment to learning. In the following conversation, Newsome discusses his artistic upbringing, the evolution of Being: The Digital Griot, and the need for the thoughtful creation of tools.

Jessica Gomez Ferrer: How has your upbringing, such as growing up in New Orleans, influenced your practice?

Rashaad Newsome: In so many different ways. One way that feels very relevant right now as you ask me this question is because I am currently in India doing research for a new piece, and what gave way to the research for this piece is how to move away from modernist performance, where you sit and watch a performance. Growing up in New Orleans, I was socialized in a way where performance was much more frenetic. It's like Mardi Gras culture, and then also moving to New York and having queer and ballroom culture, where the performance is all around you and you're inside of it. You're not a passive viewer.

Growing up in New Orleans, it's such a mashup of so many different cultures, and in many ways, it's like its own gumbo. I see my work that way. Since I've been here in India, I've been calling this project a stew: what I'm doing right now is getting all these different ingredients and spices together and figuring out what this stew is going to be. 

Jessica: When did you know you wanted to be an artist?

Rashaad: I think I always knew. My father was a singer, so my earliest memories of making art were me and my brother singing with him. I've always been creative and found ways to make things. When I got older, I realized that it's a job and you have to really take it seriously. I came more into consciousness around being an artist formally when I met an artist that I worked for in my late teens named Madeline Faust. She was a New Orleans-based sculptor. Seeing her make her work exposed me to the possibility of being an artist as a career and that galvanized everything for me. Sometimes you have to see it to know you can do it.

Jessica: Yeah, totally. Your work is highly interdisciplinary. How do you decide which medium or form can best hold an idea?

Rashaad: This might sound woo-woo, but the work kind of tells you what to do. The process is just experimenting and playing. I might see an image that inspires me to make a collage work, but then my approach to collage is not just found images cut out and put together; I'm also working in CGI and I'm making 3D models, and then printing them out and incorporating them into the image with other cutout archival images. That resulting composite image will become an actual 3D character, and then I'll rig the character and bring it to life.

Once you have a character that's brought to life, it's sort of like, well, what are they going to do? Then you're world-building. I’m always moving between mediums. Whatever medium is needed to help advance the work is the direction that I go. Sometimes it's a medium that is completely new and I know that that's what it needs, but I don't necessarily work in that medium, and then it becomes a process of learning. That's what keeps the work really exciting.

Jessica: How did the idea for Being: The Digital Griot come about?

Rashaad: It started with me thinking about how you create artwork and you put it in a room to start a conversation. And then I thought, what does it look like for the artwork to not only start the conversation, but participate in it audibly? This was before the whole AI boom. I created the first generation of Being in 2019 while thinking a lot about automation as a tool. In creating that AI, I was thinking about what agency looks like for an AI or a robot. What I came to is having the ability to break protocol or go rogue. 

You would come into the exhibition and they'd be like, "Hi, my name is Being, this is the name of the show. Would you like to know about a particular work?" They would start as a tour guide but then they would break protocol and just start reading radical texts from bell hooks or Paulo Freire. And I would see people be so destabilized by that, and it revealed their relationship to these types of tools as being these things that just obey. And whenever they don't obey, it's really irritating for people. For me, that was holding up a mirror to our impulses to create slaves, and what is it about the human condition that is so important to create?

After that I thought about Being's life outside of that exhibition. At the time, I was doing a residency at Stanford, and I started to develop the second generation. I knew I wanted them to be somewhat like a griot. A griot is an artist, a healer, an educator. They are an archive. It was a perfect container for where I wanted the project to go because they could embody all those things. Now, Being teaches decolonization workshops that combine dance, critical pedagogy, storytelling, mindfulness, meditation, and poetry. We basically turn the whole concept of a prompt for an AI on its head, because within the class, Being is getting them to dance, which gets them out of their head and into their bodies, and then introducing them to the work of people like bell hooks and Paulo Freire, who are the primary data sets that govern their machine learning model.

Being asks, "How does bell's theory of capitalist imperialist, white supremacist patriarchy show up in your life, and what's one thing you can do to start to liberate yourself from it?" And then people go into breakout groups to discuss that. Typically, as a human, we would give an AI a prompt, but Being is actually giving you the prompt to think critically about your life. And so perhaps if we think critically about ourselves, we can start to create more liberatory tools and deploy them in spaces that are more liberatory. Because the issue surrounding AI is the stewards of it, right? If we're not making tools that are really conscious, then that's part of the problem.

But then also, if we're not thinking critically about ourselves as communities, it doesn't matter how conscious the tool is. If it's being deployed in a space where the value system is, "How can we get the most for the least?" then it's still a problem. And so to me, the whole ethos of the Being project is, how do I make this AI a mirror to us? Because if we can change, then we can make better tools. But there's no version of this story with AI that doesn't lead to us changing.

Jessica: I love that you mentioned bell hooks, and I love that Being is trained on her writing. I was curious, which of her teachings or books resonates most with you, and why?

Rashaad: Teaching to Transgress, because for me it's a way of thinking about education as a form of liberation. I think about coming to know her work and how it was a language and a framework to help me understand myself, what was happening to me, how I wanted my work to be in the world, and the conversations I was trying to have in my work. That theory of the capitalist imperialist, white supremacist patriarchy also provides a moral compass in terms of the way that I want the work to be in the world. That's essentially why she's the primary data set for Being. When you're creating an AI, it can do so many different things. I knew I wasn't trying to create a Siri or an Alexa. I'm an artist, and so I had to scale it to what was possible. What was possible was creating an AI that can teach a class. Using a book like that as the primary data set really allowed me to create a machine learning model that could run a class. 

Jessica: What does working with machines teach you about being human?

Rashaad: That we have so much work to do as humans. There are so many conversations happening about the speed at which AI is growing and becoming a part of our lives. There's a lot of criticism around it, which is completely valid. I think working with these tools, seeing all of the harm that they can cause, and understanding that the harm they can cause is based on human ambition or human oversight is important. Working with machines has reinforced how much we need to be more thoughtful about ourselves and how we create tools.

Jessica: What has the USA Fellowship afforded you?

Rashaad: Well, it definitely has afforded me the time and resources to further develop this project around Being. It helped a lot with also my film, Assembly, which documented my performance Assembly at the Park Avenue Armory in 2022. Grants like this are really great, and I think what would be even better is to have more grants like it, in that they're not just once or twice, but allow an artist to build a body of work over a long period of time. It feels really important, particularly to artists like me who are doing interdisciplinary work and work that centers marginalized communities. We're in a time where there's so much erasure and dehumanization around POCs and queer people and trans people, and I think that work that centers those folks and centers ideas around liberation needs support from grants like this so that it can continue to be made.