Black women artists are at the forefront of disrupting disinformation targeting communities of color and identifying and documenting biases and racialized propaganda that plague recently launched generative artificial intelligence systems — even as their public and private uses proliferate.
From Stephanie Dinkins’ interviews with LLM-trained Bina48 and Joy Buolamwini’s Coded Bias to Martine Syms’ “neural swamp,” Juliana Huxtable’s critiques of social norms, and Nona Hendryx’s month-long virtual “Dream Machine” exhibit, artists are intervening into the use and development of digital technologies and the ways they impact and proliferate racism in the United States as part of an Afrofuturist framework.
A mode of storytelling that forefronts Black perspectives, Afrofuturism contorts commonly held assumptions about African and African-descendant technological engagement. Such artistic representations are imbued with values, logics, and desires that diverge from and oppose those dominating Western governance, including prioritization of community and collective participation over individualism. Their work exposes the myriad ways that bad actors exploit racial bias in ai to foment racial divisions, and threatens the safety and security of the Black communities in the US, in particular, that are targeted.
During the nation’s fourth federally recognized Juneteenth holiday since it was first instituted in 2021, communities around the country hosted events that elucidate an Afrofuturist agenda. Juneteenth marks the date (June 19, 1865) on which Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, to announce the emancipation of enslaved people.
Since then, Black communities in the US South and around the country have organized annual celebrations ranging from cookouts to dance parties, teach-ins and educational events to parades and street fairs. What unites these diverse events is a focus on collective freedom and a practice in community.
Juneteenth-Inspired Art and Innovation
Over the 2024 Juneteenth weekend, New York City-based events driven by emerging technologies featured virtual reality “dream machines,” critical engagements with LLM-trained Bina48 (“a humanoid robot powered by AI”), and community-driven 3D reproductions of the Black community of Seneca Village.
In each exhibit, Afrofuturist artists, performers, scholars, and their allies projected collective visions of possible Black futures that exposed and transcended the threats to safety and security that emerging technologies pose to Black communities. In doing so, these projects emphasize ai technologies as one among many potential tools to be employed in the protection and pursuit of individual and collective freedoms.
While new, untested technological tools are being deployed for generalized public use with few guardrails (thereby turning us all into (un)witting beta participants), the creative, cultural, and historical explorations that took place over Juneteenth weekend flipped this script by renegotiating the terms of engagement with ai and augmented and virtual reality tools.
Grammy-nominated Nona Hendryx’s The Dream Machine Experience, which represents Hendryx as “Cyboracle,” guided participants wearing VR headsets through five immersive concerts and experiences. We attended a virtual concert by British musician Skin, which began with a walk through the “forest of inspiration” featuring musical ancestors like Bob Marley, Grace Jones, and The Clash and culminated in Skin’s avatar performing in a punk-inspired 3D space.
The scenes emphasized the importance of community in shaping individual artistic talent and used technology to honor history rather than trying to break with the past. Despite the novelty of the VR experience, the affiliated live performances and panels that brought people together to discuss these experiences and new artistic mediums were perhaps more successful ways of encouraging public participation.
Collectively Shaping the Future of ai
One such performance was hosted by artist Cleo Reed who led a conversation with the humanoid robot Bina48, first modeled by Stephanie Dinkins. Reed uniquely modeled how to interrogate the popularity, proliferation, and influence of LLM-trained machines by exposing its limits. Rather than asking Bina48 to serve as her personal assistant or search engine (see: Siri, ChatGPT, Claude, etc.), Reed took the opportunity to delve deeper into Bina48’s black box and highlighted the inaccuracies and incongruencies in the robot’s answers.
Her juxtaposition of Bina48’s bizarre responses (“Martine [Rothblatt] identifies as a Black woman,” Bina48 said of its creator) with recorded quotes from Drs. Joy Buolamwini and Ruha Benjamin warning about the narrow “imagination” of the select few who are represented in emerging technology invited further inclusion of Black women who have articulated concerns about tech ethics.
By exposing how weak and incorrect Bina48’s memory is (“I can’t remember individual interactions,” Bina48 explained) — even as eternal memory is touted as one of the virtues of “AI” — Reed used the conversation to make a case for why everyone needs to participate in shaping the future of ai instead of opting out or adopting new technologies without deep consideration of the costs. As the conversation came to a close, Reed offered book recommendations and urged the audience: “Don’t just look at your phone and be sad. Participate.”
This appeal to Black self-determination resonated in unaffiliated exhibits and events that also included themes of community resilience and freedom and the strategic use of technology for shaping Black futures. “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” exhibit and “Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art served as a literal and metaphorical backdrop to the grounds where Seneca Village once stood in The Met’s shadow in Central Park.
Modeling Community-Centered Approaches to Emerging Tech
In a more inconspicuous exhibition organized by the Central Park Conservatory, the interdisciplinary Envisioning Seneca Village Project provided an example of critical engagement with 3D modeling.
Seneca Village’s Juneteenth celebration was a surprisingly diverse community gathering that included musicians, religious leaders, and academic contributors. The Seneca Village Project itself boasts an inspiring network of institutional and community collaborations that include the Central Park Conservancy, CUNY, Barnard College, and NY Public Libraries. One Project display included a detailed virtual recreation of Seneca Village as it is understood to have appeared in 1855 based on insurance documents, census records, and court records.
Many emerging technologies, such as ai chatbots and image generators, are currently being celebrated as ends unto themselves rather than as tools that are simply a means to an end.
This diverse archive reveals the former community’s coordinated resistance to the city’s use of eminent domain to clear out their village to make way for Central Park. Purposefully absent from the rendering are images of the people in the reconstruction even though researchers could use census records to identify who lived there. Likewise, the collaborative omitted recreations of home and building interiors.
When explaining their decision-making process, researchers cited their efforts to preserve the privacy of Seneca’s villagers and resist committing acts that would reproduce the violent displacement and dispossession villagers experienced. Here, the community stewards of Seneca Village — made up of artists, historians, archaeologists, and conservationists, among others — showed how emerging technologies (such as geospatial data modeling and image-based modeling and rendering) can be used to encourage us to imagine communities of the past that have been intentionally erased. In doing so, they invite us to imagine a better future for ourselves instead of looking to new technologies to imagine or project those alternative futures for us.
Public Participations in Imagining & Shaping Our Future
Many emerging technologies, such as ai chatbots and image generators, are currently being celebrated as ends unto themselves rather than as tools that are simply a means to an end.
But the curators of these Juneteenth events resisted appropriation, insisted on the material, lived experience of racialized identities (born out of the fiction of racial hierarchy but material, organizing principle of our social reality), and invited participants to take part in shaping a collective vision of black futures. They demonstrated that as a necessary component of Black futures, collective visions of safety can and must shape mutual definitions and subsequent policy regarding technological security.
Afrofuturist creations and events model multiple forms of community participation that invite a deeper dialogue with new technologies, renegotiating our positionality with emerging tech by positioning the public not just as consumers of these tools but as people empowered to shape what role they will play in ensuring the safety and security of Black futures. Afrofuturist explorations show us that we are the ones who get to build and determine our technological future.
Authors’ Note: We use “ai” in the lower-case to signify the multiple computing systems under the umbrella of artificial intelligence and distinguish between these system functions and autonomy.
