WEEK IN BEING TALL

It’s an unusually warm Saturday night in February. I have made it to an unassuming student house on Governor Street, and I step through a backdoor into a dark hallway. At the end of the hallway is a creaky wooden staircase.

As I walk down the stairs, I enter an entirely different world—the basement. I’m immediately hit with the smell of damp concrete and feel the heat of the sticky, sweaty bodies of the eager undergraduate students descending down the staircase with me. This particular basement is emblematic of most belonging to student housing. It’s generously post-industrial: the exposed pipes and scattered machinery provide a sentimental reminder of a time when people operated such complex mechanisms. I look up and see an ecosystem: the cobwebs provide evidence of a welcoming home for the spiders scurrying around, and the mold spots form a Jackson Pollock on the ceiling.

I am here to see TAAL, a student band out of Brown University. Since last semester, this self-described “girl band” (they assert that guitarist Mark Buckley puts the “men” in feminism) have built a substantial following within the Brown student band scene. Impressive for a band with no officially released music (they do not have a Bandcamp, Soundcloud, or Spotify page).

Student bands can be a petri dish for music-bro types who think that drawn-out and intricate guitar solos make for good music. What struck me about TAAL’s set was their simplicity. They’re a “femme-punk” band à la Childbirth that don’t take themselves too seriously; their merchandise—boxer shorts, bras, and tank tops—epitomizes this. The last after a series of student bands, TAAL’s members—Aisha Tipnis B’23, guitarist Mark Buckley B’23, bassist and vocalist Becca Siegel B’23.5, and drummer Tanya Qu B’25—have an electric stage presence: Aisha and Becca, donning heart-shaped dollar-store sunglasses, establish a playful call-and-response between themselves and with the audience. Their original music keeps the throng of tipsy college students dancing in this dingy, fairy-light-adorned basement—their track “Busy Lady” is a crowd favorite thanks to its deft one-liners (“know what they call me? / Massage Gun Kelly”). As their set ends, they manage to piece together a rendition of the Cranberries’ “Dreams” “based purely on vibes.” I’d like to think it was also based on the keg of jungle juice, empty by the time their set rolled around.

After their basement show, I sat down with members of the band to try and understand their story and chart their progress from backyards, to basements, to legendary downtown Providence DIY venue AS220.

Before the basement, TAAL were a backyard act, jamming in the garden of Brown University’s West House in the spring of 2022, they tell me. As far as the music scene on College Hill is concerned, these small garden jam sessions represented a new beginning after COVID-19 lockdowns. Guitarist and vocalist Aisha explained that such events “had stopped and people had not been doing anything [like this] ever since.” They explained that TAAL’s Halloween set in the same basement on Governor Street was especially exciting: it was their first show of the semester.

While TAAL might be a basement-show staple on College Hill, they made their first foray into the wider scene, playing alongside local Providence and New England bands People Eating Plastic, One Way Out, and Haunting Titans at AS220 on February 18. “AS220 represents a step—it’s not one of our friends’ basements, and it’s not the [Watermyn] Coop which we know… it’s exciting,” guitarist Mark said. As I was writing this piece, I tried to dig for some sort of deeper significance. What does it mean, collectively, culturally, that we could all be in a basement listening to earnest, slightly shitty music together? When interviewing the band, Becca made an ironic comment about how they are “just friends making music.” But maybe— just maybe—their friendship is about the music made along

In a world with systems created to support white supremacy and patriarchal ideals, those that exist outside of these concepts fight to stay afloat. In the case of Black and queer folk, living itself is controversial. Luckily, art has long been an avenue that embraces controversy. Sparking such controversy is the very thing that allows artists to shift the culture. The most influential art invites us to be fearless. To look at the world in all of its horror and beauty, from the artist’s eyes. Then, from an altered lens, to look inwardly at ourselves. This is what Rashaad Newsome evokes in his artificial intelligence project, Being.

I didn’t know that much about digital art—or art in general. It’s not that I find it uninteresting—my short attention span leads me to gravitate toward pieces with visually stimulating movement. I blame this on my 15 years of dance lessons; I can never sit still. After learning about this event, I did some research on Newsome. The first image I came across was a Black figure in a tribal patterned dress and red bottom heels, performing a “death drop.” I instantly knew I had to attend.

On February 7, I entered an intimate auditorium at the List Art Center. I spotted attendees from all walks of life. Young creatives wearing thrifted clothes, silver-haired, older women excited to learn about the AI art scene, and me, a student in the middle of a cold, winter slump, ready to immerse myself into the warmth Newsome’s work provokes. After I took a seat, Newsome hit the stage with a calm-toned voice and a compelling presence.

Hailing from New Orleans, Newsome delved into the digital world with a slideshow of his experimental art centered on the Black and queer experience. Newsome describes his work as “creative gumbo,” his inspiration ranging from bell hooks to friends’ selfies. This combination of Black expression of the past and present is visible in Being. The idea for Being blossomed out of Newsome’s reflections on the dehumanization of slavery. To display the practice of enslaved people being worked like machines, he created a human-modeled robot.

The AI’s exterior is made up of metallic, gold eyes referencing car culture and a body with intertwined segments of open wires and wooden-modeled fragments. Its interior is revealed through language and dance. Being teaches voguing, a dance style originated by the Black LGBTQ+ community in 1980s Harlem. Through a screen, Being demonstrates choreography and speaks in a robotic yet confident tone using AAVE references. A microphone is set up, facing the screen, allowing the audience to ask Being questions or make requests. When Being doesn’t adhere to their demands or is unable to answer to engagers’ standards, they often become frustrated. Newsome argued that humans expect robots to comply, paralleling the dehumanization of an enslaved person’s adherence to their master.

This resembles the isolating experience of simply existing in predominantly white areas. There have been times when I, as a Black woman, have been asked to speak on the Black experience as a whole to white individuals as an educational source in their anti-racist journey. These situations left me with complex and contrasting emotions. It feels like a missed opportunity not to inform them how they contribute to unjust systems of oppression. On the other hand, I am only one person. One Black woman navigating how to decline without being viewed as “sassy” or “angry” or responsible for the prejudice I receive. Moreover, I am figuring out how to operate in a digitally-centered world, where the opinions and expectations of the patriarchy dominate my feed. How can I or Being be voices against racist rhetoric in digital spaces without being flooded by microaggressions?

This patriarchal domination increases as wealthy people with poor morals stand at the forefront of digital technology. Their views often taint AI spaces. Newsome rebelled against them in his talk, displaying a video of Being voguing through city streets. Behind the AI were visuals of buildings burning down.

After the talk, the hypothetical world of the video made Hannah Bashkow B’23 ask, “Who are the people rejoicing?” She wondered what “new and different programming” would arise if women had more agency in the creation of AI.

Newsome’s work led me to question in what other ways technology is geared toward a white, male, heteronormative perspective. The concerns it expresses support my newfound opinion that technology can carry inherent racist, sexist, and heteronormative biases.

When asked what he hopes up-and-coming artists, especially Black and queer artists, take away from his work, Newsome touched on the lack of people that reflected him when entering the art world. He aspires to change this, stating, “I hope to be a demonstration and fill the void.” It is safe to say that Being, in all its Blackness and queerness, fills it.