Think you know AI? Meet Being, the vogue-dancing teacher and poet, in this wild, interactive installation.
Events related to Being: The Digital Griot will run March 30 through April 8.
A virtual entity trained on anti-racist frameworks, Black queer poetry and vogue dancing will show you a thing or two about liberation and decolonization.
Being builds on the West African tradition of the griot—storyteller, historian, poet, musician, and diplomat—taking on new life in Rashaad Newsome's brilliant artificial intelligence, which appears in giant video form. It teaches, dances, provokes and guides participants on a radical, educational journey.
The project is a critical reframing of the archive that forms the basis of artificial intelligence—pulling insights from the likes of bell hooks, Cornell West and Paulo Freire—at a time when bias in AI is deep and propagating.
Being will get you moving, thinking and collectively envisioning the future we need. Experience the Being in two ways: a Liberation Workshop or Poetry Drop-in.
Newsome's time on campus will include a screening of Assembly, followed by an artist talk and audience Q&A exploring the film's themes of Black queer futurity, technology and radical pedagogy.
Experience Being: the Digital Griot in dialogue with Reconstructing, at the Hop April 2-3. Reconstructing is a meta-theatrical play probing how we might move through history after slavery, and both works deepen our season-long exploration of arts that bring us face to face with the past.
As the birthplace of artificial intelligence—coined during the seminal 1956 Dartmouth Workshop—Dartmouth proudly celebrates the 70th anniversary of AI in 2026, reaffirming its legacy and continued leadership in shaping the future of this transformative field. Learn more>
Rashaad Newsome is a multidisciplinary artist whose work blends several practices together including: collage, sculpture, video, music, computer programming and performance, to form an altogether new field. Newsome is best known for his visually stunning collages housed in custom frames, His work is deeply invested in how images used in media and popular culture communicate distorted notions of power. Using the equalizing force of sampling, he crafts compositions that surprise in their associative potential and walk the tightrope between intersectionality, social practice and abstraction. Newsome's works opposes cultural essentialisms. They lead us into a realm of uncertainty, in which the symbols presented transform, but are nonetheless made tangible.
Dive into what lies beneath the surface of our stories: the living histories that shape our personal experiences and collective memory, by race, resistance and reckoning.
