Acclaimed singer-songwriter and producer Nona Hendryx has been asked many times to do an autobiography or full-length film about her groundbreaking career, but she always declines.
“I’m much more interested in using technology and other forms of creativity to engage with the world, and to share what it is that I have either learned or experienced or created,” says Hendryx, a Roth Visiting Scholar who has been collaborating with the Hopkins Center for the Arts and campus partners throughout the academic year.
The resulting projects—interactive artificial intelligence and virtual reality experiences called Dream Machine 2.0—will be open for visitors on June 6 and 7 at the Roth Studio Theater. In addition, Hendryx will take to the stage for a concert tribute to Labelle, the legendary R&B, funk rock, and gospel band she co-founded in the 1970s, on June 30 in Spaulding Auditorium.
The multimedia artist has long been at the forefront of music and technology. After Labelle topped charts around the world with the funk rock/soul song Lady Marmalade, Hendryx went on to a solo career with top 10 hits; a Grammy nomination for the song Rock This House, with Keith Richards on guitar; and collaborations with George Clinton, David Bowie, Prince, Peter Gabriel, and the Talking Heads.
She was the inaugural recipient of the Joe’s Pub Vanguard Award, a residency honoring artists’ contributions to American life and pop culture, and is currently Ambassador for Artistry in Music at Berklee College of Music.
A social justice and women’s rights advocate, her nonprofit, SistersMATR, promotes science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics, aka STEAM, education for young women of color. She also serves on the board of The Flea theater in New York City, where performance artist and director Niegel Smith ’02 has been artistic director for more than a decade.
Hendryx’s projects at Dartmouth are an updated and extended version of her original Dream Machine, which debuted at Lincoln Center in 2024. They comprise a VR group experience featuring her avatar, Cyboracle, and an individual experience involving personal conversations with the AI-driven avatar, which contains her professional and personal history and “deep knowledge about Afrofuturism,” says Hendryx.
In Cyboracle VR, visitors take a 25-minute journey into the Nonaverse, an Afrofuturist performance venue featuring her avatar with special “live in VR” remote performances by Hendryx from anywhere in the world. Cyboracle AI, a seven-minute experience, is set inside sound booths, where individual participants interact with a phone-based AI that creates personalized songs, collaborating with them in the singer’s Afrofuturist style.
Samantha Lazar, curator of academic programming at the Hop, says Hendryx and her work “sit at the nexus of music, art, and technology that the Hop incubates.”
“Nona Hendryx’s work harnesses history and legacy in order to innovate, while tapping into diverse artistic and academic disciplines,” Lazar says. “Her project brings Dartmouth students and scholars into collaboration with professionals working at the forefront of their fields; it’s a perfect example of the Hop collaborating with the rest of the college and serving as a conduit for the arts to embed across campus.”
“It’s delightful to see Nona Hendryx build on a commitment to innovation that brings so many different faculty, students, and community members into dialogue with one another,” says Colleen Boggs, associate dean of the faculty for the arts and humanities. “We are deeply grateful to Steve and Daryl Roth, who have made it possible for us to bring some of the finest visiting scholars and artists to campus to enrich the Dartmouth academic community with their knowledge and talents.”
Hendryx, who is based in New York City, kicked off her time at Dartmouth with a well-attended presentation in November at the Top of the Hop. She encouraged the audience to get involved with the work, to ensure Cyboracle would be “shaped by community.”
“Looking at speculative fiction, a lot of the things that I saw as a child as fiction are fact today, so it’s always, to me, very important to keep looking and designing and researching and putting forth ideas about the future, and making sure that everyone is allowed to be a part of that future,” Hendryx says.
A self-described “evangelist of Afrofuturism,” she highlights the urgency of the endeavor.
Artificial intelligence systems are being trained “predominantly on Western corporate datasets that erase or misrepresent Black voices,” Hendryx says. Cyboracle is “a counter-algorithm that centers African diasporic knowledge, artistic innovation, and liberation frameworks,” a means of preserving and evolving “the sonic signatures of Black experimental tradition.”
Hendryx’s innovation and creative practice “have stretched us all to think about how music can intersect with choreography, storytelling, Afrofuturism, computer science, and so much more,” says Mary Lou Aleskie, the Howard Gilman ’44 Executive Director of the Hop.
“As a Roth visiting artist, Nona has been able to reach across campus over the year to build relationships by working directly with students and faculty to share emerging practices in many different technologies that are foundational to her work,” Aleskie says. “The Hop is excited to finally have a platform that can share these innovations with our community in our new Roth Studio Theater.”
Throughout the year, Hendryx has been working alongside students, faculty, and staff to build the installations, a convergence of computer science and the arts.
For help with digital design and motion capture, Hendryx and her team headed to Dartmouth’s DREAM Studio in North Fairbanks. In February, they joined students and DREAM Studio director John Bell and program manager Claire Preston to record Hendryx’s movements for Cyboracle.
When her song I Feel Joy came over the speakers, Hendryx started dancing, mouthing the words as she moved. Dressed in a black baseball cap, tunic, leggings, and sneakers, she kept her eyes on the oversized monitor, where a shimmery digital double wearing feathery epaulets and knee-high boots mirrored her movements.
Extended reality artist Sutu Campbell, of EyeJack, who also worked with Hendryx on Dream Machine, cued the choreography in real time.
“Sparkle fingers,” he said. Then,“Go to the right, get the audience clapping.”
Sitting nearby was Rex Jiang, a master’s student in digital arts, who was helping with production. “It’s so much fun to watch,” Jiang said during a break.
A multimedia composer, Jiang was new to motion capture and keen on learning to work with virtual and augmented reality. Later that day, he and several other students would take part in a workshop with Juan Carlos Leon, a motion capture specialist who came in from Los Angeles to help with the direction and motion capture technology for Cyboracle.
“I keep learning new things and observing new things. It’s a good experience,” Jiang said.
Wrapping up for the day, Hendryx said that working with students has been very helpful and inspiring.
“They have new ideas,” she said. “They affect what I do.”
Preston noted that they had tried to make the experience as similar as possible to what students would encounter in professional settings.
After graduating, they can take their new skills “directly to their jobs and be miles ahead of other people,” she said.
Hendryx, who estimates she has worked with more than 300 college students over the past decade, said it’s been satisfying to see upcoming artists make the sometimes daunting transition from campus to career.
“When you’re young, you don’t know what to expect or what will happen,” she says. “To see young people blossom and to be able to give them an advantage when they go out into their careers is very important and gratifying.”
