The Cookout experiments with comics, television, and social media to repair media and technology.
The Cookout: A Guide to AI (Ancestral Intelligence) is a comic workbook and guide for storytellers, community organizers, researchers, and other leaders. The book is based on my academic book, Reparative Media: Cultivating Stories and Platforms to Heal Our Culture (MIT Press, forthcoming). The comic book narrative is an Afrofuturist tale set in a corporate dystopia that helps readers understand how media and technology can harm, and the guide offers prompts for them to write in and brainstorm how to work collectively towards repair.
The rest of the book narrates a future we can create together: The Cookout as a Black and indigenous platform for reimagining supply chains for stories and knowledge. Each chapter reimagines an aspect of how corporations cultivate stories and knowledge. These chapters are instructive and interactive. I ask the questions we must answer to host a Cookout. I briefly share how I answered them and invite you to write in and do the same.
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This edition of The Cookout comic is in beta and will be developed over the next year in advance of a limited run print edition.
For another view on the concept of ancestral intelligence, you can read the essay, “Ancestral Intelligence: The AI We Need,” in Commonplace.
Reparative Media: Cultivating Stories and Platforms to Heal Our Culture
Forthcoming on The MIT Press.
Using the framework of The Cookout, Reparative Media: Cultivating Stories and Platforms to Heal Our Culture shows how repairing our culture means healing how we make media, how we connect through technology, and how we generate knowledge.
Based on my work with OTV | Open Television, the book will include links to and essays about the original video works developed by the platform, alongside original graphics and images to explain the reparative media concept and method.
