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Oxy Arts Reading Room

This guide was created in collaboration between Oxy Arts and the Oxy Library.

About Encoding Futures: Critical Imaginaries of AI

Thursday, September 16, 2021 - Friday, November 19, 2021

Gallery hours: Monday-Friday, 11am-4pm

Every algorithm encodes a future. Artificial intelligence structures the sociotechnical terrain of our present, and the human agents who train it shape political imaginaries of what is yet to come. From predictive policing to judicial risk assessment to border surveillance to automated hiring, the encoded biases of AI systems magnify existing structural inequalities. Predictive models don’t forecast a world that might be: they reproduce the world depicted in their training data. They project worlds marked by algorithmic oppression (Safiya Noble), the New Jim Code (Ruha Benjamin), algorithmic violence (Mimi Ọnụọha), and algorithmic coloniality (Shakir Mohamed, Marie-Therese Png, & William Isaac).

Algorithmic worldmaking often unfolds in a “black box”: an opaque space of automated decision-making whose rationale is hidden from public view. Researchers and cultural workers are opening up the black box for scrutiny to imagine possibilities for feminist, antiracist, and decolonial AI. This exhibition assembles the work of artists who visualize the limits of our current algorithmic imaginaries, and envision speculative futures engineered for just outcomes.

Oxy Arts Reading Room

Resources below compiled by Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, 2021 Mellon Professor in the Practice

Syllabus for ARTH295 Syllabus: Art, AI, and the Aesthetics of Algorithmic Justice

 

Recommended Reading

The links in this section connect to electronic books or physical books through Occidental College. For those outside the Oxy Community, please cross-search these titles with your local library or bookstore.

Open Access Texts

A New AI Lexicon, eds. Noopur Raval and Amba Kak, AI Now Institute, 2021.

Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru, “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification,” Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 81:1–15, 2018.

Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein, Data Feminism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2020).

Jason Edward Lewis, ed. “Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Position Paper,”  Honolulu, Hawaiʻi: The Initiative for Indigenous Futures and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), 2020.

Jason Edward Lewis, Noelani Arista, Archer Pechawis, and Suzanne Kite, “Making Kin with the Machines,” Journal of Design and Science (2018).

Mimi Ọnụọha, “Notes on Algorithmic Violence,” GitHub, February 7, 2018.

Mimi Ọnụọha and Diana Nucera, The People’s Guide to AI (New York: Pioneer Works Press, 2019).

Şerife Wong, “Why AI Policy Needs Artists,” Medium, July 15, 2019.

Open Access Artworks, Videos, & Projects

Algorithmic Justice League, The Coded Gaze

Algorithmic Justice League, Voicing Erasure

Zach Blas and Jemima Wyman, im here to learn so :))))))

Gabor Csapo, Jihyun Kim, Miha Klasinc, and Alia ElKattan, Survival of the Best Fit

Maya Ganesh, A Is for Another

Rhizome Net Art Anthology

Hito Steyerl, How Not to be Seen

Şerife (Sherry) Wong, Fluxus Landscape: An Expansive View of AI Ethics and Governance