Ep. 215: Kinfolk’s Idris Brewster Uses AR to Empower Collective Memory Building [encore]

**Idris Brewster** (0:04)
Technology and AR in specific is super important because it allows other modes of expression to be tangible.

**Amy Devers** (0:15)
Hi, everyone. I'm Amy Devers, and this is Clever. Today, I'm talking to co-founder and executive director of Kinfolk Foundation, Idris Brewster. Idris is a Brooklyn-based artist, creative technologist, and educator who uses his technical and artistic expertise to disrupt traditional narratives through immersive experiences, all while empowering others to do the same.
Kinfolk is a trailblazing non-profit digital and educational platform with a mission to bring black and brown narratives to the forefront through immersive augmented reality experiences. Idris co-founded the platform in 2017 as a means to bridge communities.
Since inception, and with the support of the Mellon Foundation, it has changed how we learn about our historical heroes. Recognizing that school curriculum, cultural institutions and monuments have systematically excluded BIPOC histories, through Kinfolk, Idris debuted the Monuments Project, which inserts hundreds of digital monuments into public spaces, so users can experience history come to life anywhere.
Prior to Kinfolk, Idris studied both cognitive and computer sciences at Occidental College in Los Angeles, and then worked for Google, where he developed an educational program called Code Next, which exposes black and brown youth to the world of computer science, allowing them to have the tools to build their own future. As an artist, Idris focuses on blending technology and the material world, as a means of creative expression as well as socio-historical education. His creative expertise includes painting, augmented reality, 3D modeling, and hip hop production and engineering. He's received several awards and recognitions for his work, including from Sundance Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, New Museum, iBeam, the United Nations, the Museum of Modern Art, and Forbes 30 Under 30 As you'll hear, among Idris' many talents is his ability to build bridges. With the sensitivity of an artist, the precision of an engineer, and the vision of an architect, he's designing community-based systems of archiving, educating, storytelling, and collaborating that effectively distributes across the existing social and cultural divides, the tools and means of the building of collective memory. Hot damn. Here's Idris.

**Idris Brewster** (2:45)
My name is Idris. I'm from Brooklyn, New York, born and raised.
I'm an artist and creative technologist, and I just want to create cool things that tell interesting stories in unique ways. So that's why I do what I do.

**Amy Devers** (2:59)
Well, you do it well, and you are creating cool things, and I can't wait to unpack all of that. But let's start by unpacking your youth. You said born and raised in Brooklyn, and I understand your parents were documentary filmmakers. Can you take us back there and paint the picture?

**Idris Brewster** (3:15)
Yes, my parents have done a lot, I guess, in their life. My dad's a doctor, my mom was a lawyer, and while he was, he was a psychiatrist.

**Amy Devers** (3:23)
Okay, everybody's on multi hyphenate. Okay, wow.

**Idris Brewster** (3:26)
Multi hyphenate, everyone was on a whole multi hyphenate, but my dad was always interested in film. A lot of his early films were like fiction films focused on psychiatry, psychological thrillers, but they ended up creating a practice for themselves in documentary film.
My mother's a human rights attorney, and so they started shifting the focus on telling stories around impact and diversity around the world.

**Amy Devers** (3:48)
Yeah.

**Idris Brewster** (3:49)
And so one of the films that were around when I was born was called American Promise, and it followed my life from five years old in kindergarten through 12th grade at an elite private school called the Dalton School on the upper east side of New York.
And the documentary focused on what it's like for people of color to go through an environment for that long, especially an environment that's not built for them like cells. There was predominantly white upper class school. So the film really looked into the difficulties surrounding that. I mean, for myself, what that meant for me was that I was focused on otherness from a really young age, focused on to think about my place in the world in relationship to others. I was being interviewed at five years old around how I felt being the only black kid in my class. And so thinking about race from a very early age caused me to be really critical as I grew up.

**Amy Devers** (4:44)
How did it feel to be the subject of such a critical lens? By subject, I mean the subject matter.
Are you conscious of that or was it just so baked into your childhood that you aren't able to separate it?

**Idris Brewster** (5:00)
So I definitely wasn't conscious in the beginning. And I think it being my parents also had an effect on me because it was like in the beginning, it felt like I was just talking to my parents. I think it was different for the other subject, Cheyanne and how he felt because he was an outsider in terms of not his parents not making the film.