AI and Afrikan Bodies

AI and the Afrikan Body 

I wrote my master’s thesis on The Importance of Technology in the Arts. I called my graduate thesis from a completely digital script. In 2009/10 this was rare when most of what I knew of stage managers were old yt men, who were out of touch.

I find myself where a lot of ye elder millennials find yourselves as well, cradled somewhere in between the analog and the digital. I remember my life before y2k and the technological boom but I also remember how quickly things began to move. It was clear that the internet was here to stay. 

The person who’s sperm helped in creating me was a systems engineer. He got into computers when it was possible to do it without an undergrad degree, when it was a newly wide open field with all the new money flow, and naturally a lot of that intrigue fell to me as the first born child. 

Imma just call this cat Ron, to keep myself from the confusion of father or dad, cause he was neither. Ron was into all things Afrofuturism, his nickname for me was numba 1, like Riker from Star Trek. 

A stretch (cause Riker is a problematic AF) I was always Piquard, anyway. 

Part Uhura, Part Guinan, Part Geordi LaForge, Part Spock, Part Captain Siquo, Part 7 of 9. 

That’s all me. 

We can talk about Michael Burnham at anotha time, I'm still heated about the lack that is and was Star Trek Discovery. Cornrowed wigs, the CAUCASITY, hard eye roll. 

according to the dominant culture if we are to be in the future we still seem to not be able to understand our hair or ourselves, we still are viewed through the lens of ytness, the exact opposite of Afrofuturism. Our hair is literally the cosmos in human form.

But Ron had more of a sidekick, serving vibe planned for his femme children. How you can beat your children like the hell that consumed your body on behalf of others and expect anything different is ludicrous, and delusional. 

I will be healing the wounds from his lack for the rest of my life. 

But I digress

Maybe not, this all connects.

I read my first Octavia E. Butler book before the age of 10, I still remember Clay’s Ark, and Pattern Master with their weird early 90s afro futuristic art. Black Faces with peacock and animal patterns grafted to them. 

My first taste of Blackness as somethin that was all expansive, a part of and bigger than the universe, all in one fell swoop. 

Marvel’s Black Panther 

Fred Crump Jr’s Black Fairytales 

My mother’s stories of how she wanted to be a revolutionary Black Panther but Mary Francis wasn't having it, and the harm it caused, because it thrust my mother onto a path that wasn't necessarily hers. 

There’s a news article somewhere in the Denver Post with a picture of me at Akente Express in Denver, Colorado where I grew up, immersed in all the Black books where I could see myself reflected. 

My parents wanted me in the future even if they didnt know how to place me there without forcing the foundations of the dominant culture. 

I remember an aunt, who lived in Ghana for most of my childhood. I honestly don’t know or can't remember her story because my parents quickly uprooted us from our positive Black centric ass childhood and placed us in the bible belt south.

The trauma brain from that time is tricky AF because that was when I realized that my parents were together for one another and their codependency, we were no longer a priority. 

My mother’s prioritizing of my father became the center of our world, when not long before this abrupt transition she had my sister and myself in the basement bathroom letting us know that they may be getting divorced. I still wonder what if, and likely always will, since it was my body that suffered as a result. 

Like that trajectory changed me indefinitely. 

But my aunt, maybe she was a great aunt, used to send my sister and I matching wrapper outfits and I remember those being some of my most treasured pieces of clothing.

I remember the patterns I saw there and the patterns on the covers of Octavia’s books felt the same to me, they felt connected. 

My mom was always duplicitous about Afrika. She exposed us to it on every level.

We even went through Rites of Passage, which I now realize that ritual was an effort at something like the Afrikan initiation I read about in Malidoma Patrice Some’s books.

Granted this rite of passage happened within the confines of a Black Baptist Church, so I am sure you can imagine the interference, and confusion that can happen when mixing indigenous practice with yt religiosity forced on the body of your enslaved ancestors. 

One is about trusting and knowing your own discernment as it is rooted to your ancestors who push you forward, the other leaves you with a empty vacuum of self that seeks validation from everything and everyone outside of you. 

Both cannot thrive in the same body, one is man made, the other ordained. 

But that division remained within me, the technology I knew and the tech(know)logy that was calling to me from deep within my ancestry. I will spend the rest of my life undoing one to embrace the other in full. 

Without western tech(no)logy I would never have found Afrikan Indigenous tech(know)logy. 

My understanding of western technology has always been that it is controlled and evolved at the hands of its creators. It is formed by the minds of those who have the most access to empire, power, and money, yt men. 

Men generally are inefficient, they don't think holistically, they think in terms of greed and power and how to constantly insert themselves into cycles that have been fine since the beginning of time. 

Afrofuturism exists to bring the celestial down into reality and restore it to the bodies in which it has always resided, but now lies dormant. 

My first understanding of AI was via movies. Bicentennial Man, Back to the Future, and The wiz. 

What y'all think the tin man is?

And then it was smart phones, and smart tv’s, smart speakers, eveythang is smart if you need it to be. 

We were all training AI before we actually realized it was a thing, whether via CAPTCHA, or Face ID, CCTV ain’t new, and those clever lil palm sized genocidal devices we all hold 

But the outrage around AI and art and music and beyond that has happened over the last few years is hilarious to me, because everyone is in an uproar, but most ain't giving up the amenity that AI provides, and we all slept through, ignored, or were distracted when the foundations were being built. 

We were too busy operating in the future and too tired to go back and get it. Fuck the present, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, cause if they are focused on tomorrow I can trap them in today. 

The way the droves of social media move like driven cattle, surface level knowledge and never knowing a thing for yourself.

Blame it on my colonized mine, or my learning it from yt women, but I am always going to know a thing if only to know that it is not my thing. 

A year ago I was grieving my non-existent signed modeling career, 10+ years of creating a stellar body of work, and not a year after being signed, I asked to be released. One of the first things I kept thinking about, what can I do with this body of work? 

Thousands of images, dead in the water, but water is life and death, and they were indeed alive, even if my career was not. 

I would revive my work with AI. All of my characters are distant relatives of me, they are created with (see)ds from my body of modeling work. 

left me for Good Dye Young, Top Creature Camp, Hot Pink Dottie"s Delights

I had seen a few posts on AI and fat bodies or Afrikan bodies but none of them coming from my perspective. And most of what I saw was a pull for social media engagement and building parasocial relationships and not the challenging of a technology that was formed with the exclusion of Afrikan and bigger bodies. 

I researched the prominent AI generators, did some light research and picked a generator that wasn't one that the masses were talking about. And I began my experiment, it didnt take long to see that AI on Black bodies was meant to skew us as grotesque or within the framework of how yt folx think we should be. 

The moment I started entering Black and Afrikan words, words associated with our bodies and hair into my prompts it was like the generator had a panic attack. 

these are some of the first images I pulled from the generator. features blurred, double noses etc

I could barely pull an image that looked like something human, and if i did she was always light skinned, with an hourglass figure and yt features, I was basically get Bey lite ith every generation. Beyonce’s internet made all the sense then, because that is what they were training these generators with. 

this is what the generator will give you even if you tell it dark skin, black skin, Nubian skin. this is my biggest frustration even with the way i have evolved what I am able to pull. The standard for Blackness is anything that isn't Black and closer in proximity to this is yt futures and story their tech(no)logy tells.

I got weird ass versions of Black hair and all of them were creating some weird baby hair effect, and were mimicking that damn brazilian wavy and not the cloud hair I needed. 

Again, coloniality on the Afrikan body even when I am using an imaginative tool that allows me to place us in the future.

So I went back to the drawing board, did a deeper dive, and realized that the more clever I was with words, the more I could flex and get the end result that I wanted. This was about overthinking, about letting my colonial brain roam free in all them damn books and degrees I got to move me away from my indigeneity. 

an example of what one of my prompts looks like

AI prompt generation is storytelling in technological form. It also restored the mineral in me, returned me to storytelling which was taken from me after I finished my master’ thesis, my voice completely removed and the voice of my proofreader and faculty in place instead. 

Mineral people via Dagarra Cosmology. Minerals are the bones of the earth. Stones, shells, metals, rocks, corals etc, they hold the memory of our stories along with the stories of the earth. I am mineral, you can find your element simply by knowing your earth year. 

Once I finally hit my stride and the generator was bending to the will of my Afrikan womb, the waters within began to flow without, the stories came to me and the characters flowed from them and into my generator and then back into me, a healing ritual. 

last summer in LA as we were in the throws of fighting homelessness and I was spending a lot of time of public transit and engaging the homeless community of the street there. with no place to belong, i made the subway into outer-space. Gave myself the space the world would not.

I was creating worlds and planets I had only dreamed about, Black coneheads, Afrikan Martians, Mami people, the list goes on and on. 

I saw past and future versions of me, because it is all energy, ancestors be we, and what I can pull from the generator will not be the same as you because of how we are alchemically.

Aiva Tco (octavia backwards and split in 2) was one of the first stories and characters i wrote for the fatlaxy. the story is linked, tap the image.

But the lie that I am stealing from “real” artists and money they need. AI doesn’t even scratch the surface of what I do. It's mad telling how folx support these big ass AI accounts and there's not a problem to be had. I get bullied regularly, so much so that my AI account is private and will likely remain that way. 

Folx should say what they mean and mean what they say,  because the technology is here, and folx anger at me is misplaced, you're mad at the lies that yt men tell to push and seal their agendas of power and manipulation for another generation.  

It is the purpose of an artist to push people to think outside the boundaries they have been placed in, to make them wonder what could exist of the other side of (trans), not simply to make profit while the people who can afford your work hoard it and place them in closed off boxes, where its energy meant for community healing is now lost. 

The art those generators pull from, ain’t Black art, it's the art of dead yt men which is stolen from Afrikan bodies. Look at where we are still positioned as Afrikan people, look up and at the world, change may be on the horizon but it has not yet arrived. 

Anti Blackness is still the name of the game. 

Remember Black Lives, Sudan, Haiti, The DRC, Black bodies across the diaspora. 

When I use AI it is reparation,  it is also my body of work that the world also told me wasn’t art.

My modeling is my documentation of my body and its movement through yt space and time,

a place that says you gotta be light, paper thin, and basically an empty vapid hole in order to inspire people about the beauty of their bodies. 

The evolution of my body into AI time and space is tech(know)logy a testament of proof of my presence here, when folx are still working overtime to erase who and what we are as deeply beautiful Afrikan Peoples.