Cultural Memory: Artistic Experiments in AI
Abstract: A series of artistic research projects exploring cultural (dis)connections across time and geography using AI and anti-colonial methods. As an Algerian and a creative technologist, Yasmine explores how she and other displaced peoples could reconnect with intangible heritage, reviving and contextualising shared cultural memories as well as building new collective approaches to AI practice. This presentation spotlights three of Yasmine’s current projects: 1) An Algerian Techno-Ritual How can auto-ethnographic visual art be made without reproducing the colonial gaze? Using AI as a digital witness, producing meaning from aesthetics while rejecting biometric data capture and surveillance culture through a set of AI-generated face filters that echo the aesthetic of Algerian face tattoos. 2) Mediterranean Hand Gestures This interactive project uses a camera to detect hand gestures and audio to produce corresponding verbal sounds. Yasmine was inspired to create a system that can preserve and demonstrate common Mediterranean hand gestures, capturing the meanings of these non-verbal expressions of emotion before they are forgotten. 3) AI Justice Matrix: The Futility of Policy Craft An online platform and collaborative authorship project that invites the perspectives of practitioners concerned with our relationship with technology, developed as part of Yasmine’s JUST AI fellowship at the Ada Lovelace Institute. Fundamentally, this project refutes the notion that effective policy making, as it relates to AI ethics, is at all possible. It acts as a critique of Euro-centric knowledge processes and the way they manifest as curated information flows passing though sanctioned knowledge keepers. It treats all sources and expression of knowledge as valid. It offers issues to consider when contemplating AI practice without necessarily offering an answer.
Author bio: Yasmine is a researcher and creative technologist. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the Ada Lovelace Institute, researching anti-colonial ethics for artificial intelligence. She was named as one of '100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics 2022'. She is currently collaborating with the CSNI at South Bank University and The Photographer's Gallery on an Alan Turing Institute funded project on visual cultures and computer vision and has recently published a paper on ethnic disparities in higher education in England, which was featured in the Times Higher Education. She has researched and taught at universities in the UK and Sweden. Her creative and consultancy projects are listed on her website: https://yasmine-boudiaf.com/.
Recorded Presentation | 26 April 2023
#InterculturalApproaches #DecolonialApproaches #Culture #MarginalizedCommunities #Artists #Algeria
