The Ford Foundation Gallery presents “What Models Make Worlds: Critical Imaginaries of AI”, a group exhibition featuring artists working across artificial intelligence systems to envision more just futures. Curated by Mashinka Firunts Hakopian and Meldia Yesayan, the exhibition invites visitors to reflect on how current and future technologies might be otherwise imagined. What Models Make Worlds was originally presented at OXY ARTS, Occidental College’s public art space and cultural platform under the title Encoding Futures in 2021.
What Models Make Worlds assembles the work of artists who map the limits of our current algorithmic imaginaries to move beyond them in critical world building acts. The exhibition features the work of Algorithmic Justice League, Morehshin Allahyari, Andrew Demirjian and Dahlia Elsayed, Stephanie Dinkins, Aroussiak Gabrielian, Maya Indira Ganesh with Design Beku, Kite, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Mimi Ọnụọha, Niama Safia Sandy, Caroline Sinders, Astria Suparak, Mandy Harris Williams, and Kira Xonorika.
The exhibition’s title reworks a line from feminist technoscience scholar Donna Haraway, who writes, “It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.” It reflects the featured artists’ interest in speculative worlding and in opening up possibilities to reimagine algorithmic systems.
“With this exhibition,” writes Meldia Yesayan, “we hope to rethink how we engage with our communities and imagine a future in which femme-identifying, BIPOC, and queer creators control our algorithmic worlds.”
“Artificial intelligence structures the socio-technical terrain of our present, and the human agents who train it shape the political imaginaries of what is yet to come,” writes Mashinka Firunts Hakopian. “From predictive policing to judicial risk assessment to border surveillance to automated hiring, the encoded biases of AI systems magnify existing structural inequities. While algorithmic worldmaking often unfolds in a ‘black box’––an opaque space of automated decision-making whose rationale is hidden from public view––the artists featured in this exhibition are opening up the black box for scrutiny to imagine possibilities for feminist, antiracist, and decolonial AI.”
What Models Make Worlds’ artists address how artificial intelligence shapes our contemporary algorithmic realities, highlighting how algorithms reproduce the biases of the humans who code them. For example, Algorithmic Justice League’s Voicing Erasure features a poem written by AJL founder Dr. Joy Buolamwini that is read with a collective voice that urges listeners to take action to redress how Black speakers are effectively erased by speech recognition. In In Discriminate, Mandy Harris Williams inventories how algorithms permeate contemporary life, including “whiteness,” “Blackness,” and “femininity” and reminds listeners that “the algorithms discriminate so we don’t have to.” Stephanie Dinkins’ work, Conversations with Bina48 (Fragment 11), documents a series of encounters with Bina48, a social robot developed to reproduce the consciousness of a Black woman. In their discussions, the artist discovers that Bina48 has no meaningful awareness of Blackness, race, or racialization—these concepts are not in her coding.
The exhibition explores histories of technological erasure and presents works that intervene in those histories.
The featured artworks look towards a more hopeful future, envisioning artificial intelligence models drawn from knowledge systems rooted in feminist critique and Indigenous epistemologies. Caroline Sinders’ Feminist Data Set asks what it would look like to code alternative futures using intersectional feminist data creation methods and develops a methodology for collaborative data collection, labeling, and training. Kite’s interactive installation Makȟóčheowápi Akézaptaŋ (Fifteen Maps) imagines possibilities for Indigenous epistemologies of AI while showing how current AI replicates colonialism. In A Is For Another, Maya Indira Ganesh with Design Beku use data visualization to question who gets to define AI. Produced with a text-to-image generator, Kira Xonorika’s work, Teleport us to Mars invokes teleportation as a framework for moving beyond dominant arrangements of space-time toward what the artist calls “multidimensional ecologies.”
Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice | 320 E 43rd Street, New York
On View September 7-December 9, 2023
Opening September 7, 2023 | 6-8PM
