Conversation
Missing Data, Cleaning Data, Leaving Data
Ether’s Bloom: A Programme on Artificial Intelligence
Visual: Luis Kürschner, with kind support from Studio Linné
In the context of Ether’s Bloom: A Programme on Artificial Intelligence, the artists Mimi Ọnụọha and Elisa Giardina Papa will introduce their works and enter into a conversation around data in relation to classification, algorithmic biases and how we learn from alternative systems of knowledge. The conversation is introduced by Eliane Eid and moderated by Clara Meister. Mimi Ọnụọha and Elisa Giardina Papa’s work is presented on the first floor of the Gropius Bau between 10 August 2023 and 14 January 2024.
Mimi Ọnụọha creates works that question and expose the contradictory logics of technological progress. Through print, code, data, video, installation and archival media, Ọnụọha offers new orientations for making sense of the absences that define our systems of labor, ecology and relations.
Elisa Giardina Papa’s research-based art practice seeks forms of knowledge and desire that have been lost or forgotten, disqualified and rendered nonsensical by hegemonic demands for order and legibility. Giardina Papa traces how recurrent forms of extractive capitalism and imperialism have strained our capacities for living and labouring by shifting through discarded AI training datasets and other forms of censorship.
Taking place both online and offline, the Gropius Bau’s first programme on artificial intelligence (AI) focuses on AI’s utopian and poetic possibilities. From June 2023, the first part of the programme, Ether’s Bloom, kicks off a sequence of new projects including a Writer in Residence, artistic explorations, a podcast, lectures and conversations. The development of an app with a special focus on education and accessibility forms the programme’s second part.