Mashinka Firunts Hakopian & Sarah Higgins in Conversation

Join us April 12 via Instagram live as Sarah Higgins and Mashinka Firunts Hakopian discuss their contributions to our Spring 2023 issue, Artificial Intelligence.

Mashinka Firunts Hakopian and Sarah Higgins, co-editors of the Spring 2023 issue of ART PAPERS on Artificial Intelligence, will discuss the themes and content of the issue. Rather than focusing on the hype of emerging technologies, this issue explores ancestral knowledge, heritage algorithms, and the conceptual origins of the nonhuman. The issue’s contributors also highlight the importance of non-Western perspectives and practices, retrieving and re-figuring non-Western pasts that are often ignored in discussions of emerging technologies. They will also discuss contributors’ emphasis on queer liberation and the importance of embodied knowledge—perspectives often overlooked in discussions of artificial intelligence and technology.

Mashinka Firunts Hakopian is an Armenian writer, artist, and researcher born in Yerevan and residing in Glendale, CA. She is an associate professor in technology and social justice at ArtCenter College of Design. In 2021, she was a visiting Mellon Professor of the Practice at Occidental College, where she co-curated the exhibition Encoding Futures: Critical Imaginaries of AI with Meldia Yesayan at OXY ARTS. With Avi Alpert and Danny Snelson, she makes up one-third of the collective Research Service. She is a contributing editor for ART PAPERS, and her writing and commentary have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Performance Research Art in America, Hyperallergic, and Meghan Markle’s Archetypes. She is the author of The Institute for Other Intelligences (X Artists’ Books, 2022).

Sarah Higgins is editor + artistic director of Art Papers