LASER Talks Cambridge (UK) in collaboration with LASER Los Angeles (UCLA)

Artists are well-placed to ask critical questions that are aware of but not constrained by the nature of AI, grappling with questions of access, agency, and equity in relation to AI and its impact on the art ecosystem, including the encoding of bias and the (digital) marginalization of various social groups, including but not limited to people of color, immigrants, and women. Such critique of AI allows for the emergence of those bodies (of knowledge) that stem from, or live through, the types of cosmologies that have been marginalized or erased through colonization but can be recentered through processes of decolonization, i.e. through a questioning of the patterns of power that shape our intellectual, political, economic and social worlds.

In 2019, Amir Baradaran was at the forefront of the AnotherAI.art: Decolonizing Art Ecosystem Summit, which united over 80 distinguished thinkers and professionals to delve into the intersections of critical discourse, art creation, and artificial intelligence. This initiative, endorsed by the New Museum, the Knight Foundation, and Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, sparked the concept of a unique issue recommended by Victoria Vesna, North American editor of AI & Society: Knowledge, Culture and Communication. The groundwork established during the summit has grown in importance given the advent of Chat GPT, presenting substantial and pressing questions that our society faces today.

Satinder Gill, the managing editor of AI & Society and Victoria Vesna are delighted to extend an invitation to Amir and contributors to the special issue for a series of intriguing dialogues.

Please register for this event:
https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAtdO6hqjkvH9CctwW9dzj5zgkgbc0Z9e...

Image credit:
Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, The Institute for Other Intelligences (Lecture Performance), 2023.