Dispatches from the Institute for Other Intelligences

Presented in

“The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be”
Centre Pompidou & Kadist
With a Musical Score by Lara Sarkissian
July 13, 2023

This lecture-performance adapts the text of The Institute for Other Intelligences (X Artists’ Books, 2022) in a presentation delivered by the director of a fictive institute for training feminist bots and “artificial killjoys.” Set in an indeterminate future, the lecture unfolds against the backdrop of a symposium where machine intelligences convene annually for curriculum on algorithmic equity. Drawing on feminist, queer, and critical media scholarship, its “algorithmic bias training” aims to deploy the radical operations of speculative learning machines from the future toward alternative outcomes in the present. Refusing models of AI as a “view from nowhere,” the director embodies sociotechnical systems whose ways of knowing generate oppositional automata. With a score by Lara Sarkissian.

About “The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be”: “The Centre Pompidou and KADIST are launching a three-year collaboration to explore artificial intelligence and text-to-image technologies, and how they will impact the field of artistic creation and production. These extractive softwares are poised to disrupt, launching debates about automation, problematics of cultural aggregation, issues of artistic consent, and the limits of copyright. As the first in a new series of collaborations between KADIST and major museums (“KADIST Nomadic Collection”), this multi-part association will start as part of the Moviment program, on July 13 at the Centre Pompidou. “The future isn’t what it used to be – A new generation of texts and images.” A conference during Moviment inaugurates this new collaboration with an afternoon of conversations, video screenings and discussions, from 3 to 9 pm. The focus will be on critical takes of this cultural moment, as AI is simultaneously absorbed or deployed and alternately resisted and rejected.”

Featuring: Nouf Aljowaysir, Carlos Amorales, Eric Baudelaire, Sofia Crespo, Mathew Dryhurst, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian (with a score by Lara Sarkissian), Holly Herndon, Ho Rui An, Agnieszka Kurant, and Juan Obando.

Documentation by Justin Musyimi.