Decolonizing Archives: Video & AI

Assignment

Re-Imagining Other Futures

For this project you have to use Midjourney as your AI tool to create visual outputs that explore the politics of pattern recognition and machine learning. You are asked to create a project in collaboration with this generative AI tool as a way to address, explore, unveil, and interrupt the biased notion of digital libraries and archives that a tool like Midjourney, pulls data and material from. The growing ubiquity of generative AI tools has simultaneously expanded and contracted representational possibilities. On the one hand, these tools seemingly open up new realms of creative imagination. On the other hand, these tools also reproduce inherited erasures and legacies entrenched within machine learning (ML) datasets that are based on Western and imperial forms of knowledge and representation structures. What does this tension mean for our culturally situated modes of storytelling in the present and in the future?

Your project should be made using the following guidelines:

Guideline 1

A political, social, or cultural topic that you are interested in exploring concerning the re-imagining of Futurism and Futurity. The goal of this project is for you to understand what kind of biases are embedded in AI tools and the data libraries that they pull information from when asking these tools to imagine a certain scenario in the future. Once you learn these biases, you will then work to train or interrupt the AI tool by introducing a new set of data to it. The topic of future building and future imagining has been a decolonial mode of world-building for marginalized communities, especially in recent years. Envisioning BIPOC or/and queer/trans, disabled bodies throughout time and space, or futuristic scenarios away from Capitalism, Colonialism, and Imperialism, resists the belief that we are relics of the past (as colonial paradigms would have us believe), stuck in a world in which western colonialism has left us. Imagining a future where we can see ourselves as a BIPOC community, addresses how a system of white supremacy, superiority, and privilege has dominated sci-fi and futuristic image creation. For this project, the goal is that you will envision other visions of your preferred futures.

Some suggested topics:

Kinship with Nature and other species and/or Environmentally Sustainable Futures; Sustainable Culturally Specific Architecture; BIPOC Sci-fi movie scenes/robots/AI; A world where capitalism has ended; A world where imperialism and settler colonialism have ended; A queer and trans-loving world; An outer space exploration by all BIPOC or all womxn astronauts and explores; Museums without stolen objects (for example what if British Musuesm was re-imagined without its stolen objects?); A future world without harmful technology; A future world without silicon valley; A booming economy of currently underdeveloped countries; A gender equal world; etc etc.

Guideline #2

You are asked to create 40 sets of images plus a logline research. This is divided into two sections.

1. Create 20 images based on text prompts. This first section should help you understand how the machine thinks, acts, and pulls information. It’s your first step in understanding and studying the biases based on the topic you have chosen.
2. Then create 20 images using your own library or image archives. The logline will have to include your prompts, and your notes on the topics of your exploration and “tuning”, decolonizing, and interrupting the process. I will explain this further during our class session.

Guideline #3

You must submit all 40 images for your final project plus the logline report. But for our critique session, you can choose a 15-20 selection of the best images to discuss your topic and research.