The Cookout is a multiplatform project designed to cultivate solidarity and empower historically disempowered artists and communities. Each experiment with the cookout builds on the last to form a strong foundation for developing a reparative AI platform.
THE COMIC
The first stage of The Cookout project is a comic book, The Cookout: A Guide to AI (Ancestral Intelligence, to be published by For The Birds Trapped in Airports Press in 2025. An advance draft copy is available for download and includes insights on the relationship between ancestral versus artificial intelligences. Announced during my opening keynote at the 2023 Association for Internet Researchers conference, the Afro-indigenous futurist comic set in an AI dystopia is a workbook for creators, organizers, and researchers to help them use reparative media practice as they organize stories and data. I ask readers the same series of questions I asked myself in developing OTV. This method is the foundation for the next two experiments.
THE TV SERIES
The Cookout is a Black-led series, inviting artists and community leaders across disciplines — music, film, dance, theater, poetry, culinary arts and more — to share their recipes for liberation.
The Cookout is modeled after Soul, one of the first Black television series in the US, which blended uncensored music, dance, poetry, theater, and conversation on public television from 1968 to 1973. The Cookout brings this show to the 21st century, adding social video (e.g. TikTok), gaming, AR/XR/VR and AI-based art.
I believe our culture needs another series that breaks the boundaries of form and invites non-Black people to “the cookout” to model what solidarity looks like. The show will be released online and in cities where we can host in-person cookouts with local artists and organizers.
The Cookout is an experiment in decentralizing intellectual property ownership: it is collectively owned by the producers; every invited artist will own their segment; and the audience may have the chance to own a piece of the show through blockchain.
It is created by me and developed with Emmy Award-winning producer Makiah Green (left); Emmy Award-nominated director Sam Bailey (middle); and Emmy-nominated producer Sarah Minnie (right).
MAKIAH GREEN (executive producer, left) is an Emmy Award winning producer, writer and entrepreneur on a mission to tell nuanced stories that reflect the beauty and nuance of Black life. She is the Founder of Get Free Media, a disruptive production company and collective studio that provides creators of color with culturally specific development support. As the former Senior Vice President of LizzoBangers, Makiah developed and executive produced Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls for Amazon Studios, which won 3 Emmys and took home a Producers Guild Award and Critics Choice Award for Best Competition Series. Previously, Makiah worked as a Manager of Original Series at Netflix, where she oversaw a number of critically acclaimed shows including MO, Dead to Me, Gente-fied and Dear White People. Before joining the Netflix team, she rose through the ranks at MACRO, where she developed films including Judas and the Black Messiah, Sorry to Bother You and Really Love.
SAM BAILEY (director, middle) is an Emmy-nominated writer and director from Chicago, currently residing in Los Angeles. Bailey is the director of Marvel's upcoming series for Disney + Ironheart, the co-creator of the acclaimed Emmy-nominated webseries Brown Girls, and the creator of the Gotham-nominated webseries You’re So Talented, which premiered at Tribeca. Bailey served as a producer and as a director on the final season of Netflix’s Dear White People as well as a director on the previous season of the show. Bailey directed the Powderkeg digital series East of La Brea (SXSW Selectee, Urban World Film Festival Winner), and episodes of television including Grown-ish, Loosely Exactly Nicole, and The Chi. Bailey received praise for her examination of gender and patriarchy in her short film Masculine / Masculine which premiered on Vice. Bailey's work has been featured in many publications and she was included in the Forbes 30 Under 30 Class of 2018, The Root’s 100 Most Influential African Americans of 2018, and received Shadow and Act’s Rising Award in 2019.
SARAH MINNIE (producer, right) is the founder of Minnie Productions. She is an Emmy nominated producer and award-winning director of documentaries, commercials, fashion films, music videos, web series, pilots, short films, features and more. Her work has been published in VOGUE, The Chicago Tribune, Hyperlink Magazine, Women & Hollywood, and in film festivals such as DC Black Film Festival, NYC Web Fest, Austin Film Festival - just to name a few. The devotion to continuously serve the marginalized community she represents and loves, has led her to partnering with organizations that align with her missions to support the Chicago intersectional filmmaking community. Most recently Sarah partnered with Open Television (OTV), as the first ever Development Officer in 2020. And, in 2021, OTV’s Head of Artist Development and Production.
AJ CHRISTIAN (executive producer) is an associate professor of communication studies at Northwestern University. His research focuses on the political economy of legacy and new media, cultural studies and community-based research. He published his first book, Open TV: Innovation Beyond Hollywood and the Rise of Web Television (NYU Press, 2018), and is currently writing his second book, Reparative Media: Cultivating Stories and Platforms to Heal our Culture (MIT Press, forthcoming). He has given lectures for and collaborated with the Sundance Institute, Vimeo, the SAG-AFTRA Foundation, Black Public Media, and more. He has juried television and video for the Peabody Awards, Gotham Awards, and Tribeca Film Festival, among others. His work has been recognized by the MacArthur Foundation & Field Foundation (Leaders for a New Chicago, 2019), Variety (Top 50 Entertainment Instructor 2020 & 2021), Filmmaker (25 New Faces of Indie Film, 2018) NewCity (Film Leader 2017 & Film Hall of Fame 2020), Chicago magazine (New Power List, 2021) and Seed&Spark (Filmmaker to Watch 2018). Dr. Christian co-founded OTV | Open Television, a platform for intersectional television. OTV programs have received recognition from the Television Academy (Emmy Awards), Webby Awards, Streamy Awards, Gotham Awards, among others.
THE APP
I am currently conducting the first phase of researching and developing a social networking platform called The Cookout, inviting participating artists and audiences of The Cookout series and their networks to share their stories and data. Using the method of the Cookout as seen in the comic and Reparative Media book, The Cookout app will serve as a basis for developing Black- and indigenous-led AI.
The first phase of research is surveying and interviewing artists and scholars on how they are navigating social media, to test demand for an alternative platform. Through a grant from the Wallace Foundation, in partnership with OTV and Detroit Narrative Agency, I am surveying, interviewing and organizers media organizations led by Black, indigenous and people of color in the Midwest; and through an in-progress grant to ACLS with co-principal investigator Dr. Sarah Jackson, Presidential Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, we will be surveying and interviewing members of the Critical Race and Digital Studies group of scholars of color who study race and technology. Beyond these groups, I am supporting and in coalition with dozens of scholars, artists, and leaders of non-profit and for-profit organizations across film, TV, theater, and other indie media/arts who I plan to invite to the Cookout App (several of these coalitions are also raising production funding that can serve The Cookout series).
My goal is to launch a beta version of the Cookout app in 2025 coinciding with the release of the first episode of The Cookout series. While it is possible to launch an independent low-cost social media app where we own our data at through companies like Mighty Networks, I am in early conversations with AI scholars at Northwestern and beyond to develop a bespoke app capable of blockchain/AI integration. I have draft plans for how to cultivate community and consistent use on the app, including a regular video podcast that features Cookout members, ways to contribute to The Cookout series through the app, and hiring doctoral students to moderate and encourage its use from members.
The goal of the admittedly ambitious Cookout project is cultivating community-based strategies for incentivizing artists, community organizers, and scholars to work together to develop our own AI through ancestral intelligence. I hypothesize ancestral intelligences can guide this development process. As my comic and academic book demonstrate, the cookout, as an ancestral Black American practice, is a productive framework for guiding how to invite (develop), cook (produce), serve (distribute), and host (exhibit) our stories and data. My team will rely on intergenerational strategies for cultivating knowledge, from programming based on the Earth’s cycles (e.g. a video podcast may be released once a season or every new moon) to inviting Cookout app members to share their family stories and intergenerational healing practices.