The Barbaric Yawp Project

In many traditions older and wiser than ours about the relationship between the living and the dead, the ancestors are not gone. They are available through oral and written traditions, and starting now, through artificial intelligence. Our ancestors have lived through earlier incarnations of our current suffering and conflicts. They carry a knowledge and wisdom the living cannot reach, because the living are inside the moment, and the moment is too loud in its chaos to hear anything but the noise.

The Barbaric Yawp Project calls out to our ancestors and asks them to speak to us from their hard-won perspectives about what is happening now. Each Yawp is an act of creative witnessing in the voice of a particular figure, grounded in the documented record of their life, words, and legacy.

The occasion for this calling out is Trumpian America, which I take here not as an aberration but as a culmination — of speed, spectacle, grievance, and the erosion of symbolic depth. The voices summoned do not agree with one another. They are not politically aligned. They offer no single program. What they share is a refusal to let the present imagine itself without memory.

These Yawps are elegies from the dead to the living in our troubled times. They are intended to be evocations of the spirits of significant contributors to our collective psyche, not exact portraits of image and voice.

Whitman's yawp was an exuberant, primal, untranslatable cry. The yawps in this collection are often something else as well: carefully composed, biographically dense, sometimes dark, sometimes warning, often unemotional in their delivery of political and social facts. They are barbaric not in their sound but in their refusal to be polite — their refusal to soften the diagnosis, their refusal to make the dead say comforting things.

Each Yawp is created using artificial intelligence — currently Claude and ChatGPT — as a symbolic and linguistic instrument. I prompt the model with the particular ancestor, their writings, and their life. The model produces a draft text. I edit and revise it, sometimes substantially. I then search for images and recorded voices of the ancestor where they exist, and use the application D-ID to assemble text, image, and voice into a video. None of these videos is the actual ancestor. Each is a creative interpretation — an active imagination — of what the ancestor might say to us now, based on the record of who they were and what they thought. All Yawps are based on the dead. None is based on the work of a living person.

Each video runs three to five minutes. It is suggested that you watch no more than one or two videos at a time, as each requires time, reflection, and digestion. In an environment where content is made and consumed too quickly to be absorbed, digestion is the right metaphor — allowing the video to move slowly through the psyche, breaking it down, retaining what nourishes, letting go of what does not. It enriches the experience to share listening to the yawps with one or more chosen companions.

The dead do not save us. But they may still help us remember what we once knew and chose to forget.