Art does not exist in a silo; it permeates our everyday experiences, adding a richness to the ways in which we see ourselves as creators and collaborators with each other, with our natural environments, and with the systems within which we operate and interact. Often, even without knowing or acknowledging it, each of us plays a part in the creative process. There is also an art to how we live and how we “curate” our lives; whether that be in how we serve our communities through our jobs or volunteering or in how we engage with our families and friends.
We’re reminded of the pioneering work of artists and authors who envision new worlds through radical imagination, who birth new realities through the boundless creativity of artistic expression. Afrofuturism creates a space to envision new realities where Black people play an active and critical role in building and shaping our society. The National Museum of African American History & Culture defines it as ‘expressing notions of Black identity, agency and freedom through art, creative works and activism that envision liberated futures for Black life.’ Drawing on African traditions, diasporic experiences, and futuristic visions, Afrofuturism is also the convergence of art, culture, and technology––and of imagining new possibilities.,
For our first Spin Cycle post of the year, writer and cultural commentator Jewels Dodson draws on the seminal work of sci-fi author Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and the pioneering work of Rashad Newsome’s explorations of identity, power, and representation through digital media, AI, and performance.
Read it below
“You got to make your own worlds. You got to write yourself in. So I got to write myself in.” – Octavia Butler
Those words are from science fiction literary genius (a designation assigned by the MacArthur Foundation) Octavia Butler. For Butler, the sci-fi landscape, which for so long was considered a reading world of imagination for 14-year-old boys, not for real readers and certainly not for serious writers, was a space with no walls and no closed doors. It was limitless and boundless. Butler said, “You can look at, examine, play with anything, absolutely anything.” Similarly, the ground-breaking artist Rashad Newsome draws on the impact of technology to explore themes of power, identity, and transformation.
Butler’s sentiments hold true in contemporary art through the medium of technology. Artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality, digital fabrication, blockchain, data art, augmented reality, and NFTs are all part of today’s contemporary art conversation. Science fiction and technology run parallel because they’re vast frontiers where endless possibilities are not the epilogue but the prologue, something Rashad Newsome knows all too well. Technology offers artists the opportunity to not only create new worlds but actualize them. It also allows our shared world to be reframed in the way it ought to be, where heinous histories are inimitable, people are prioritized, pain is minimal, and love is plentiful.
Imagine a 3-D avatar of a humanoid robot, its face embellished like the Pho masks of the Congolese Chokwe people, its body inspired by Cis female urban aesthetics and transwomen rendered in a rich mahogany hue. Its circuitry is exposed like raw emotions. Think Naomi Campbell enveloped in Thierry Mugler’s robot suit, voguing. Newsome’s Being, the first generation of which launched in the Spring/Summer of 2019 with the support of the LACMA Art + Technology Lab Grant. She took the role of a tour guide for his exhibition To Be Real and is flushed with ideas about identity, feminism, socialism, race, and power. Brought to life during Newsome’s exhibition at the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center (PPAC), Being discussed a variety of challenging topics with guests, including art historical erasure, the social implications of artificial intelligence regarding rights, liberties, labor, and automation, the importance of the imagination as a form of liberation, and the subjectivity of body autonomy within an inherently inequitable society.
Newsome built Being as a reimagined version of the griot—a fixture of West African culture, a living library, the keeper of stories, traditions, and ideologies. Being is powered by and empowered from some of the world’s most renowned and beloved intellectuals. Michel Foucault, Paulo Friere, and bell hooks all live deep within Being’s digital DNA. In the creation of the social humanoid, Newsome diverted from the deficits too often associated with Black and trans-Black womanhood. He started from a space of self-actualization, power, and abundance, filling Being with the knowledge required to know oneself.
Newsome’s creation isn’t blind-sided by oppression and its by-products. Instead, it has been created with consciousness and full agency. The artist fuels his imagination with technology that gives us a glimpse into a living experience that is decolonized, where liberation both politically and personally, is possible. And like other artists who delved into the world of AI, such as Jacolby Satterwhite and Kalup Linzy, to imagine new worlds, Being represents a future that we can all strive for.
CONTRIBUTORS

Jewels Dodson is an arts and culture writer and producer. She started her career writing and editing for street-culture magazines throughout New York City. Her work can be found in Juxtapoz, Artnews, Artsy, The Cut, and the New York Times. Most recently she launched The Shortest of My Tall Thoughts, a micropod in which she examines cultural theories and trends.