Event 4
The event I attended was LASER: De-colonizing AI. I was particularly interested in Mashinka Hokapian's presentation. Hakopian is a writer, artist, and researcher. She is an Associate Director of Research for the Future of Democracy program at the Berggruen Institute. She is currently working on a book project that considers the role of ancestral intelligence and diasporic worldmaking in emerging technologies. Hakapian started off the presentation by asking the questions: Why is it that genetic art announces itself as the future, when it is rooted in the past? How do longstanding structures of power and western systems of aesthetic value haunt algorithmically-enabled art that purports to be emphatically new? She explained that AI is algorithmically trained to create artwork. It takes images from 80,000 of the greatest artworks, the majority being Renaissance paintings. This means AI systems are programmed on thousands of paintings made by Western European and American artists over ...