#1540: Hacking AI for Black Representation & the Future Dreaming of Archival Collections with Tamara Shogaolu

Voices of VR

Curating archives was a theme that I also explored in a conversation with Tamara Shogaolu about her piece ORYZA: HEALING GROUND that premiered at DocLab 2024. She was at SXSW showing the interactive AR story game ANOUSCHKA exploring the memories of her grandmother through various cultural artifacts (see Shogaolu interview with her about ANOUSCHKA from its world premiere at DocLab 2023). ORYZA wasn't showing at SXSW, but I had a chance to catch up with Shogaolu to unpack how she's working with archives to document cultural artifacts enslaved people, and then expand it into speculative art with a consistent aesthetic using a custom-built AI system that is centered on Black histories. Shogaolu details her experiences of instances where large-language model AI systems have erased Black people, and how she's had to hack existing AI systems in order to get the outputs she wants. But she’s also training entirely new models using materials from archives that are not included within existing models. We explore the paradox of desiring cultural representation in these AI systems while also avoiding the negative side effects of extractive cultural appropriation, and this new trend of training custom AI models as a form of artistic expression leading of future dreaming to unique mash-up of speculative futures and historical archives. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality