2022_AlBadri_Babylonian_Reference

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.