Afrofuturist artist Nettrice Gaskins, last seen here hosting an art gallery in Second Life since her LA show was cancelled by the pandemic, has a thought-provoking and actually rather thrilling post linking Black Algorithms of the past to the present:
Kuba cloth’s complexity derives from semi-symmetric compositions of simple geometric motifs. The semi-symmetry in the motifs are similar to Ghanaian Kente and other African textile designs. You can also find these motifs in African American quilts. The knowledge and practice crossed the Middle Passage where it became codified and passed down through generations. These designs are also computational; they use a generative (shape) grammar that, in effect, formalizes an algorithm that generates strings in a language...
This algorithm is also used to create music, as evidenced by James Brown (and others) who pioneered funk and hip-hop/rap. James Sneed wrote about it in a 1981 essay titled “On Repetition in Black Culture.” Snead says that human culture evolves and things from the past emerge in the future as either improved or retrogress. What is interesting to me is how, in computer science, the generative grammar used to create the textiles and musical sequences are linked to artificial intelligence, specifically neural nets and machine learning. I use the latter to create art such as this piece.
She means the one here, an amazing portrait of Stacey Abrams she created using Gatys image style transfer, which is (as explained here), "[N]eural representations to separate and recombine content and style of arbitrary images, providing a neural algorithm for the creation of artistic images."
She relates the Abrams portrait to improvisation: "Improvisation depends on the ability to extemporize new melodies (training data) that fit the chord sequence (model)," she tells me, citing her essay here. "Call-and-response participation is happening, too, as the medium (machine) responds to the data input."
Dr. Gaskins has a book touching on this coming soon from MIT Press, Techno-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation. Meantime, here's my profile on her portraits of Black artists using Deep Dream AI algorithms from 2019, including Sade, Nnedi Okorafor, and (now tragically poignant) Chadwick Boseman (also below):
More here. All images copyright Nettrice Gaskins.
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