ART PAPERS in LA

Join ART PAPERS @ JOAN in Los Angeles
Saturday, April 29, 5:00–7:00 pm PST
1206 Maple Avenue, Suite 715, Los Angeles, CA 90015
Free, but registration is requested.

This event will feature an illustrated reading by Art Papers contributing editor, and AI issue co-editor, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian from her new book The Institute for Other Intelligences, a special screening of INYAN/ZINTKALA/INYAN KAGAPI (STONES MAKE BIRDS MAKE STONES) by Kite, a reading by issue-contributor K Allado-McDowell from their current book Air Age Blueprint, followed by a conversation between co-editors Mashinka & Art Papers editor + artistic director Sarah Higgins, and audience Q&A. Copies of the issue will be available for sale.

The practices featured in this issue of ART PAPERS demonstrate how AI systems can act as a proxy for the broader structures of coloniality, exploitation, oppression, and bias that too often undergird software’s logics, but AI can also be mobilized toward thinking differently; toward reordering our understanding of human boundaries, histories, and relations with others. This issue’s contributors emphasize themes of queer liberation, insisting on embodied knowledge over collected data, and of modes of resistance that emerge alongside emergent technologies. Rather than dwelling in the space of hyper-novelty conjured by many discourses on emerging technologies, this issue turns its attention to ancestral knowledge, heritage algorithms, the conceptual origins of the nonhuman, and practices that retrieve and re-figure non-Western pasts.

Mashinka Firunts Hakopian is an Armenian writer, artist, and researcher born in Yerevan and residing in Glendale, CA. Her research attends to cultural practices that intervene in existing sociotechnical systems and produce alternative imaginaries of the future. Her work is concentrated in media studies, feminist and queer studies, visual culture, contemporary art, and SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) diaspora studies. She holds a PhD in the History of Art from the University of Pennsylvania.

In 2021, she was a visiting Professor of the Practice at Occidental College, where she co-curated the Oxy Arts exhibition “Encoding Futures: Critical Imaginaries of AI” with Meldia Yesayan. The exhibition assembled the work of artists who visualize the limits of our current algorithmic imaginaries, and envision speculative futures engineered for just outcomes. Her writing and reviews have appeared in Performance Research Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, ART PAPERS, Hyperallergic, Georgia Journal, and Art in America. Her individual and collaborative work has received coverage in the LA Times, Art in America, Hyperallergic, Asbarez, and Armenian Public Radio.

Kite is an award-winning Oglála Lakȟóta artist, composer, and academic. Her scholarship and practice explore contemporary Lakȟóta ontology (the study of beinghood in Lakȟóta), artificial intelligence, and contemporary art and performance. She creates interfaces and arranges software systems that engage the whole body, in order to imagine new ethical AI protocols that interrogate past, present, and future Lakȟóta  philosophies. Her interdisciplinary practice spans sound, video, performances, instrument building, wearable artwork, poetry, books, interactive installations, and more. Her work has been included in publications such as Atlas of Anomalous AI, Journal of Design and Science (MIT Press), and The Funambulist. Her award-winning article “Making Kin with Machines” and the sculpture Ínyan Iyé (Telling Rock) were featured on the cover of Canadian Art. Kite has been working with machine learning techniques since 2017 and developing body interfaces for performance since 2013. Her artwork and performance have been featured at numerous venues, including the Hammer Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, PS122, Anthology Film Archives, Chronus Art Center, and Toronto Biennial of Art. Honors include the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholarship; Tulsa Artist Fellowship; Sundance New Frontiers Story Lab Fellowship, which allowed her to collaborate with top experimental artists and develop a film with AI techniques, Fever Dream (2021); Women at Sundance |Adobe Fellowship; and Common Field Fellowship, among others. In fall 2022, she gave a talk at Bard as part of the Disturbance, Re-Animation, and Emergent Archives conference, hosted by the Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck, a three-year project that proposes a Native American and Indigenous Studies approach to revitalize the undergraduate American Studies Program.

K Allado-McDowell is a writer, speaker, and musician. They are the author, with GPT-3, of the books Pharmako-AI (Ignota), Amor Cringe, and Air Age Blueprint, and they are co-editor of Atlas of Anomalous AI. They created the neuro-opera Song of the Ambassadors, and they record and release music under the name Qenric. K established the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google AI. They are a conference speaker, educator, and consultant for think tanks and institutions seeking to align their work with deeper traditions of human understanding. K’s work has been covered by The New York Times, The Atlantic, WIRED, Bookforum, Artforum, Lithub, The Warburg Institute, and the Institute of Network Cultures.

JOAN is a Los Angeles-based nonprofit art space for exhibitions, performances, screenings, and discursive events. Founded in 2015 by three female curators, and inspired by the history of feminist performance spaces, JOAN supports experimental practices that exist outside of commercial contexts. Over the past eight years, JOAN has presented work by over 130 artists, the large majority of whom identify as women, non-binary, or as members of the LGBTQ+ community, often supporting them in their production of larger-scale projects at key points in their careers. JOAN aims to enrich the communities we serve with free, public programming that is intellectually stimulating and that has creative, cultural, and educational value.

JOAN is on the 7th floor and has a wheelchair accessible elevator. Please contact JOAN with any accessibility questions, 1(213)441-9009.