The past seven years have seen a rush of art exhibitions about artificial intelligence and machine learning. These shows have parsed both cultural fantasies and cold hard facts of AI. These shows’ curatorial frames are at times fiercely critical and at other times fawning. In X-TRA Volume 24, Number 1, Editor Anuradha Vikram focuses on one such blockbuster exhibition, Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI, which was on view at the de Young Museum, San Francisco, from February 22, 2020–June 27, 2021. In their essay, Vikram probes the show’s position through artworks both skeptical of and in thrall to algorithmic control. They put forth the argument that art institutions taking up AI as a theme must better grapple with their own framings of the human.

On October 28, Vikram joins Mashinka Firunts Hakopian for a conversation moderated by Nora Khan, executive director of Project X Foundation, at the MAK Center’s Mackey Apartments. Hakopian is a professor, writer, and scholar versed in critical imaginaries of technology and AI. Vikram and Hakopian will explore how museum exhibitions subtly reinforce norms embedded in quantitative systems. As we learn to live with a menagerie of uncanny beings—non-human intelligences, eerie avatars and bots, figurations just at the edge of understanding—how might we understand the influence of the art that takes them up as subject, as collaborator? What models of the human are encoded into AI artworks? 

Mashinka Firunts Hakopian is an Armenian-born writer, artist, and researcher residing in Glendale, CA. She is an Associate Professor of Technology and Social Justice at ArtCenter College of Design. In 2021, she was a Mellon Professor of the Practice at Occidental College, where she co-curated the Oxy Arts exhibition “Encoding Futures: Critical Imaginaries of AI” with Meldia Yesayan. Her book, The Institute for Other Intelligences, is forthcoming from X Artists’ Books.

Anuradha Vikram (born 1976, New York, NY; lives in Los Angeles) is a writer, curator, and educator. Vikram’s book Decolonizing Culture (Sming Sming Books, 2017) helped initiate a global movement to decolonize arts institutions and monuments. They have written for art periodicals and publications from Paper Monument, Heyday Press, Routledge, and Oxford University Press. They are an Editorial Board member at X-TRA and an editor at X Artists’ Books.

Vikram is faculty in the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture. They hold an MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts and a BS in Studio Art from NYU.

Moderator:

Nora N. Khan is a curator, editor, and writer of criticism on digital visual culture, the politics of software, and philosophy of emerging technology. She is the Executive Director of Project X for Art and Criticism, publishing X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal in Los Angeles. She is also the Curator for the next Biennale de L’Image en Mouvement in 2023, with Andrea Bellini, hosted by Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève. Khan’s short books are Seeing, Naming, Knowing (Brooklyn Rail), on the logic of machine vision, and Fear Indexing the X-Files (Primary Information), co-written with Steven Warwick. Forthcoming are No Context: AI Art, Machine Learning, and the Stakes for Art Criticism(Lund Humphries), The Artificial and the Real (Art Metropole), and a hybrid memoir about criticism from Strange Attractor Press.