American interdisciplinary artist Rashaad Newsome wanted to create a human-centered AI that expresses the best of humanity, unencumbered by the corrupting influence of systemic racism and oppression. GCL helped realize this vision with BEING (the Digital Griot), a social humanoid AI chatbot undefined by race or gender, which uses a combination of 3D animation, game engines, generative grammars, scripted responses, and machine-learning models to actively engage with — and teach — humans.
Newsome developed BEING’s search algorithm which uses non-Western indexing methods and highlights alternate histories and archives such as abolitionist, queer, and feminist texts. The model was trained primarily on the works of authors, social activists, philosophers and poets like bell hooks, Dr. Cornel West and Paulo Freire.
GCL rigged and modeled BEING so that it could animate in real-time using custom choreographed motion-capture. Next, GCL integrated voice-to-text software which allowed guests to speak and ask questions to BEING as well as text-to-voice software which allowed BEING to speak from its wealth of information.In addition to performing at a few museums, BEING was a months long installation at the Park Avenue Armory in NYC where workshops were held combining lecture, dance, storytelling, mindfulness meditation and Q&A. BEING was recently featured as part of the New Frontiers programming at the Sundance Film Festival.
