Can AI be used for the greater good? Rashaad Newsome shows us how with his community-healing robot

Just one glimpse at a film or video featuring Being and you’ll be immediately spellbound. Developed in 2019 with the help of faculty and students at Stanford University in California, Being’s build combines tech including animation game engines, scripted responses and unique machine-learning models. Rashaad refers to his robot as a digital griot – named after a travelling storyteller, poet or musician in the West African tradition – that was initially constructed as a tour guide for his Too Be Real exhibition, exploring gender and Blackness. The robot is also trained with the texts of theorists such as bell hooks and Paulo Freire, loved by Rashaad for their “palatable theory”, as he seeks for it to be accessible and speak directly to the community.

In his latest film Hands Performance – commissioned by Somerset House – Rashaad presents to us Being 2.0, set in outer space and inside a spaceship decorated in a Baroque style. Its mission is unapologetically clear. “This is for the deaf and hard of hearing girls” is uttered from the ether as we are made to feel the beat, and told to listen with our eyes. The film, taking its name from an element of vogue fem and a ballroom category in its own right, is a sum of the movement of two vogue fem performers and one Black queer ASL interpreter, bringing to light the expansive nature of Black and queer non-verbal communication.

“I realised how small and galvanised the deaf and hard of hearing community were, and how often these opportunities aren’t taken up by them,” he tells us. “I sent the poem in the film through the Being voice generation model and originally had the voice over the track and I loved it. But, I had to take it out. The most radical thing I could do was privilege the deaf and hard of hearing community.”

Any move that Rashaad makes seems to change his practice tenfold. After moving to Oakland in 2019, he realised that the prevalence of homelessness and mental health issues in California is unlike any he’d ever seen. “I’ve lived in London, Paris, Zurich and New York and I’ve never seen that,” he tells us. “And the mental health issues within the Black community – that is a critical conversation.” In the video for his forthcoming app, Being becomes a therapist speaking directly to the Black community, with not one minced word and proclamations of therapeutic healing. Rashaad is still in the process of developing the app with Black therapists, “because it involves EMDR and I don’t want to further trigger people”. He adds: “Black people are living in a space of trauma, but aren’t given the space to have an emotional response to it without being further traumatised. This app is me figuring out how to be a balm for that.”

Rashaad acknowledges that the Being App is in part a selfish feat – “I want to heal too”, he says – but it also has great promise for his collaborative work in the future. In one of his travelling pieces Shade Compositions, he works with Black women as they each perform a singular gestural movement, exploring the depths of the Black vernacular, stereotypes and the way in which they are perceived. This work isn't all in Rashaad’s control, taking patience and surrendering to the process into account. “We had to stop the filming during one of the performances, because the composition brought up feelings of trauma. That’s why I want the app to go into schools, community centres and universities, because it can heal so many and maybe even allow my process with work like Shade Compositions to run smoother,” he tells us.

In Rashaad’s work, it’s hard to deny that it transcends time and space, while also being particularly grounding because of his consistent questioning of power and agency. The more you admire Being, the more it becomes apparent that it is an amalgamation of his beautifully enigmatic practice and a crucial development for the communities he holds dear.

Hands Performance is available to watch here.