Babylonian Vision
Nora Al-Badri
Medium: Artificial Intelligence and Video (2020)
Issues: Decolonizing AI and Digital Heritage
Project Links
Description
Gan Video, 2020
Al-Badri expands on speculative archaeology and decolonial as well as machine learning based museum practices by generating technoheritage. A pre-trained neural network based on GAN technology (General Adversarial Networks) was trained with 10.000k images from 5 different museum collections with the largest collections of Mesopotamian, Neo-Sumerian and Assyrian artefacts. The images were in the majority collected through web crawling and scraping and without the institutions approval (even though she asked each museum beforehand) and just two through their open API. Subsequently new synthetic images evolve as a living memory of the images. The generated image is at the same time the artefact itself. Yet, materiality is very important, since the input images are images of material objects of our past. If MI is seen as a technology performing and processing our collective memory it makes sense to apply it to our big cultural data of the past and to generate new images as traces and circulating image worlds. Applying MI to cultural big data supplies other, more speculative and abstract insights on the search for a visual language, form and pattern of an era within a specific spatial context: Babylonian. The input images of these databases carry time and memory themselves (patina, broken pieces, most of them mid- to low-res). Subsequently new synthetic images evolve as a living memory of the images. The generated image is at the same time the artefact itself. The series consists of over 150 videos.
With texts written by Prof. Wendy M. K. Shaw, Dr. Fazil Moradi, Dr. Saud Al-Zaid, Daphne Dragona, Dr. Anita Hosseini
Engineers: Negar Foroutan and Melika Behjati
Realised in the framework of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne CDH AiR program 2019
Prior Showings:
2022 LIAF Biennale, Fantasmagoriana, Lofoten/Norway
2022 SHTATËMBËDHJETË (17), Pristina/Kosovo
2022 Automated Photography, ECAL, Lausanne, Paris
2022 POCHEN Biennale 2022 Chemnitz
2022 Triennale Kleinplastik, Fellbach
2021 Solo Exhibition, Babylonian Vision, Art Lab, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
2021 European Media Art Festival (EMAF), Kunsthalle Osnabrück
2020 Manifesta Public Program, Marseille
2020 online, ‘AIArt for good‘, AI for good summit United Nations, STATE
The work was awarded an honorary mention from Art Jameel.
Bio
Nora Al-Badri is a multi-disciplinary and conceptual media artist with a German-Iraqi background. Her works are research-based as well as paradisciplinary and as much post-colonial as post-digital. She lives and works in Berlin. She graduated in political sciences at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main and is now the director for AI+Art at the ETH AI Center in Zurich. Her practice focuses on the politics and the emancipatory potential of new technologies such as machine intelligence or data sculpting, non-human agency and transcendence. Al-Badri’s artistic material is a speculative archaeology from fossils to artefacts or performative interventions in museums and other public spaces, that respond to the inherent power structures.