The Stories of Tomorrow Pulled from the Past via AI.
Long before revolutionary digital technologies became ubiquitous mind melds, the artist ruled; they still do. Their Art extemporised the News, was cognitively symbolic of our status quo, and intensely allegorical.
A piece like this above, (remind you of anything?) captures multiple meanings: humanity’s cursed ills, damned chaos, starry eyed political corruption and the bold temerity of our times. This is our innards especially on those crappy days expressed by Pitu — an audacious young French artist. Pick your meanings.
I’m in Brussels prepping for a conference presentation next week on the AI and the stories of tomorrow, when I come across her work off the Rue De La Madeleine.
It’s been some week tying up a 6000-word article on pioneering radio from discovery of archive in my garage. It’s cleared an important stage for inclusion in an academic journal celebrating the BBC’s output from 1922–2022. And then there’s the last hurdle for our hush, a-year-in-the-making project “16-Storeys”. It looks to be on course.
AI is the paradoxical leveller — to be feared at all costs for its profound technological intervention on creativity and labour. There’s a train coming and its going to sweep us away, well, some of us.
The upside? A boon in the personalisation and democratisation in story telling, but of course there’s a caveat. Algorithms out doing creativity creates a deeper sense of provenance and the value of what it truly means to be human.
And where previous technologies were deliberately denied to specific groups resulting in false or unknown knowledge, AI provides for a correction — a creed to story up. And Art frames a narrative for where we could be heading.
“Basquiet ?. It reminds me of Basquiet”, I say to Pat who is managing the Pitu gallery. “Yes Pitu was inspired by him”. Basquiet’s dystopic Untitled (Skull) a pastiche of graffiti, African Latino influences and collapsing every-art-genre-all-at-once was of its time — the desperation of 1970s.
Now, climate crisis, parasitical politics, and neurotical news by a journalism class game-theorying audiences is writ large here. For €3000, the chance to own a Pitu.
The story takes us back almost 200 years ago, when French neoclassical painter Paul Delaroche aghast at a new invention, the photographic revolution, becried ”From Today Painting is dead”.
Delaroche’s was a de facto news visual journalist, a sort of indie 19th century filmmaking. His Napolean (Checks Ridley Scott’s 2023 film) successfully recaptured the stark truthfulness of the French Commander traversing the Alps on a mule for another fight, compared to the earlier propagandists work of Jacque Louis David.
Cameras forced painters to new levels of creativity, breaking centuries of established conventions around perspective and the human form, and hence spawned new radical styles that re-framed our feelings and relationship to inspired creativity, much to the chagrin of this body below. Impression, expressionism et al were birthed in the West. Basquiet and Ritu could become de rigeur.
Walking by the Academie Royal des Beaux — Arts in Brussels, I can’t help think what they and members in Paris staring into a denial abyss must have been thinking in 1880 as their supreme authority was melting away.
The pomposity, power and livelihoods of grey men who determined who was an Artist, where they could exhibit, and how they could make a livelihood was drawing to a close. Now anyone affording paints and brush, with talent could have a stab. Some groups never had to wait; they were simply denied permission. That shouldn’t be the case with AI storytellers.
We’re part way into the story. The day before I visit this palatial building, the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) on the outskirts of town.
From the outside its grand facade speaks of ludicrous wealth across a sprawling estate, overseen by the immortalised image of King Leopold II. Infamously, the King needs little introduction. His murderous rule over the Congo, which is 80 times the size of Belgium and creation of the Congo Free State in 1885 left 10 million souls dead.
The RMCA was built in 1910. Five years ago it underwent five years of renovations in an attempt to recast, coming to terms with the story of Black people and colonialisation.
Through its Bauhausish glass entry to the left and via an underground walk way, you pass an imposing 22m dugout canoe (a fifth of a 100m race length). That first piece bears a contested history of being bequeathed or forcibly taken.
Stories of artefacts, treasures and inquiring plot lines. Centuries old rituals, matured cultures, customs, and Art that would have an impact on the global south.
You realise the barbarity of how country inflicted immense continuing sufferings on another, how the afflicted’s histories and stories were denied and the museum’s position with signage like this.
From Today Storytelling is Dead.
Confronted with AI for storytellers the AI threat is evident, but for a small coterie of Artists facing the unmeasurable threat of instant imagery almost 200 years ago came an opportunity.
In the face of these existential threats is a matrix where industry and academia have driven the narrative, and diverse Artists and people have been denied agency.
How can AI address this? How can it help re-tell stories untold? In the museum’s viewing room Dr Chérie Rivers Ndaliko reveals how documentary makers created propaganda films to fit stereotypes.
AI represents an inequality, easily rehashing the above narratives as its algorithms trawl the internet and corporate data. But there’s also a way we’re in creating a community to wrestle with craft and context to provide answers.
The impressionists turned the Art movement inside out. They challenged an approach, when it was difficult to discern. Gustave Courbet was likened by the establishment to “Corrosive mucus”, “genital” and flatulence swellings”.
Today, Pitu (www.art47.b) doffs her cap to Basquiet, Basquiet to Picasso, and Picasso seemingly is the originator of the ritual mask style, though the truth lies within the culture of Africa.
My presentation next week frames one of many approaches I’ve been bowled over by in using AI as storytellers. In my case, stories of the diaspora. This one here is of my father, who at the age of 25 left the Gold Coast, as it was known then, to come to Britain, as a British subject.
These are Stories of Tomorrow Pulled from the Past via AI. The Ghanaian, made with the help of AI.
I’m a filmmaker, journalist, artist and academic ( based at JOMEC) specialising in an art form called Cinema Journalism. I’ve recently joined the academic and curatorial council of the Pan African Heritage Museum
(PAHM).
