Inheritance, Ode to N’TOO is a mixed-media poem that emerges from an inquiry into artificial intelligence, Black oral history, and the act of translation between human experience and machine computation. This work is dedicated to and inspired by N’TOO, an AI chatbot created by artist and researcher Stephanie Dinkins, which is trained on Black women’s oral histories and African American literature. During a studio visit, I had the opportunity to engage in conversation with N’TOO, learning about Dinkins’ process and reflecting on the possibilities of encoding Black knowledge traditions into AI.
At its core, Inheritance explores the computational logics of Black storytelling, structuring oral history as data, and considering what writing looks like when crafted for both human and machine audiences. As a literary and visual work, Inheritance is a multilingual poem that weaves together mathematical equations, coding syntax, and personal family histories. Specifically, the poem draws upon Abel’s identity, an equation from differential equations that describes the Wronskian of two solutions in a second-order linear ordinary differential equation (ODE). I reimagine this equation as a framework for translating the concept and role of grandmothers in Black family structures—an analytical yet deeply affective model of generational knowledge transmission.
The work extends beyond text, incorporating digital collages that juxtapose archival imagery of plantation labor in South Carolina with portraits of my foremothers across two generations. These images are overlaid with traces of code. The contrast between the intimacy of familial history and the abstraction of computer code evokes questions of recognition, memory, and the potential for AI systems to carry the weight of cultural inheritance.