“WHITE ROBOT TEARS”
Astria Suparak
Installation (Vinyl Wallpaper and Video on Monitor), 14.5 x 9 feet / 442 x 285 cm
2023
Commissioned for What Models Make Worlds, Ford Foundation Gallery, New York
and New Eden, ArtScience Museum, Singapore
https://bit.ly/white-robot-tears
Suparak “interrogates the sociopolitical structures of science fiction.” – Gail Chin, Joel Chin, Adrian George, and Honor Harger, curators, New Eden
“Astria Suparak’s Asian futures is a multipart series that examines half a century of American science fiction cinema to surface techno-Orientalist representations of the future. Across these films, visual cultures drawn from discrete Asian contexts are conflated, flattened, and treated as ornamental raw material for scenarios that are absent any Asian protagonists.
In the collage White Robot Tears, produced for the exhibition, the artist compiles film stills that marshal empathy for AI agents who are coded as white and humanized through their association with whiteness, including Ex Machina, Blade Runner, and A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Suparak’s video Virtually Asian is embedded in the collage and assembles footage from films like Star Wars and Ghost in the Shell. These films extract Asian visual cultures to perform worldbuilding at the same time that they omit Asian actors from the worlds they build.
Suparak’s media archaeology disrupts these racialized imaginaries of AI and identifies openings for building future imaginaries otherwise.” – Mashinka Firunts Hakopian and Meldia Yesayan, curators, What Models Make Worlds
White Robot Tears is an expansion and update of Sympathetic White Robots (2021), and the precursor to White Robot Tears (Cry Me An Ocean) (2024).
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EXHIBITIONS
What Models Make Worlds: Critical Imaginaries of AI
Ford Foundation Gallery, 320 E 43rd St, New York, NY 10017
September 7–December 9, 2023
In computer science, algorithmic models are used to forecast and visualize prospective futures. Beyond recent large language models (ChatGPT) and image generators (DALL-E, Midjourney), modeling is also used in predictive policing, judicial risk assessment, automated hiring, and elsewhere. These models structure our present, projecting worlds marked by radically asymmetrical power distributions.
Invoking the various meanings of “modeling,” the exhibition assembles the work of artists who map the limits of our current algorithmic imaginaries and move beyond them in acts of critical world building. Modifying a line from feminist technoscience scholar, Donna Haraway—“It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories”— the exhibition’s title reflects the featured artists’ interest in speculative worlding and in reimagining algorithmic systems.
Algorithmic worldmaking often unfolds in a “black box”––an opaque space of automated decision-making whose rationale is hidden from public view. The featured artists open up the black box for scrutiny, imagining possibilities for feminist, antiracist, and decolonial AI.
The exhibition is curated by Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, associate professor of technology and social justice at ArtCenter College of Design and Meldia Yesayan, director of OXY ARTS.
Artists: Algorithmic Justice League, Morehshin Allahyari, Andrew Demirjian and Dahlia Elsayed, Stephanie Dinkins, Aroussiak Gabrielian, Maya Indira Ganesh with Design Beku, Kite, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Mimi Ọnụọha, Niama Safia Sandy, Caroline Sinders, Astria Suparak, Mandy Harris Williams, and Kira Xonorika
New Eden: Science Fiction Mythologies Transformed
ArtScience Museum, Marina Bay Sands, 6 Bayfront Avenue, Singapore 018974
Oct. 21, 2023–March 3, 2024
New Eden: Science Fiction Mythologies Transformed offers fresh insights on science fiction, a genre built on envisioning alternative futures and imaginary realms. The lines connecting science fiction with Asian philosophy and mythologies are brought to light through the work of twenty-four Asian women artists and collectives.
The exhibition is organised into eight chapters that feature contemporary artworks, historical artefacts and films from both Asia and the West. Adopting Western science fiction paradigms, such as parallel worlds and interdimensional travel, as a starting point, New Eden explores science fiction’s possible roots in Asian philosophy and spirituality. Themes such as hybridity, mysticism, transcendence and other-worldly utopias, which are found in both fields, seem to point to cultural traditions in Asia.
As diverse voices gain prominence, the traditionally male-dominated genre of science fiction is slowly evolving. But rarely is science fiction approached from the perspective of Asia and through the work of women. Moving seamlessly between ancient mythology, contemporary art and post-modern cinema, this exhibition celebrates the dream worlds, futuristic visions and fantastical realities envisaged by Asian artists, showcasing women and alternative voices who are calling for a more inclusive future.
Curated by Gail Chin, Joel Chin, Adrian George and Honor Harger.
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PRESS
ARTREVIEW, “What Models Make Worlds: Critical Imaginaries of AI,” Cassie Packard, November 2023
“The bias-riddled frameworks and myopic visions endemic to algorithmic models today are taken to task in this gimlet-eyed group show, held at the fledgling gallery arm of a philanthropic powerhouse. (The exhibition, previously titled Encoding Futures, travelled from Oxy Arts in Los Angeles, where it was on view in 2021.) With varying degrees of explicitness, the featured artists ask whose interests such algorithms – which are typically guided by the pursuit of capital and design philosophies like ‘Move fast and break things’ and ‘Don’t make me think’ – serve and whom they disenfranchise, harm or erase. The majority of the works on view are social justice-oriented without being didactic to the point where open ends are foreclosed. Instead, critique feeds speculative worldbuilding, wherein artists – and viewers – imagine what technologies encoded with feminist, antiracist, decolonial or anticapitalist epistemologies might look like. […]
Cultural imaginaries around AI are of course not only gendered but also racialised, a thread that Astria Suparak pulls with Sympathetic White Robots (White Robot Tears version) (2021/2023). The vinyl print collage features scenes of emotionally distraught AI – all of whom are white-coded – from popular sci-fi flicks like Blade Runner (1982) and Ghost in the Shell (2017). This wry yet weighty piece is part of Suparak’s research project Asian futures, without Asians (2020 – ongoing), which lays bare American sci-fi’s disturbing fixation with superficially Orientalist futures populated by white protagonists. Within that white supremacist cinemascape, these robots’ proximity to whiteness can be seen as making them sympathetic subjects: a shameful testament to the extent to which technological futures must be reimagined, particularly in the West.”
BROOKLYN RAIL, “Crisis, A Critical Imaginary,” Charlotte Kent, Nov. 2023
The crisis of AI is most obvious in the technology’s ongoing bias concerning Black and brown people, a fundamental problem in continuing use of these major data sets; as one example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics finds 70 percent of fast food workers to be white but Stable Diffusion’s model represents fast food workers 70 percent of the time as Black or brown. Voicing Erasure (2020), a three minute video by Algorithmic Justice League, as well as works by Stephanie Dinkins, the recipient of the first LG Guggenheim Award earlier this year, or Astria Suparak’s Virtually Asian (2021) engage the stereotypes that seep into data sets. Researchers have for years critiqued the “dubious curation” and continue to emphasize the need for solidarity and ethical AI standards within these trillion parameter machine learning models; when people talk about the decreasing costs of training AI models as enabling greater accessibility, that depends on continued use of these problematic foundational sets like LAION. Scholars from leading research institutions proposed “The Foundation Model Transparency Index (FMTI)” necessitating greater transparency if AI companies are to be held accountable.
[…] The virtual voice assistants are known to depend on underpaid global labor and reports earlier this year on the exploited labor of Kenyan workers scrubbing toxicity from ChatGPT also revealed how these AI systems would replace this underclass at the cost of those workers’ mental health and futures. The labor crisis is not ameliorated by these technologies, unless labor is designed differently. What Models Make Worlds is an important exhibition for audiences to view and engage with the social and economic issues that are pressing our representatives to make decisions; if we aren’t informed about these AI systems then how are we to voice our concerns and demands within this representative democracy?
[…] Dürer wrote that “The ‘measure’ of a human figure is especially hard to comprehend, amongst other reasons because the human figure is composed neither by rule nor compass but is contained within irregular curved outlines, it is specially hard to write and treat of it.” Our crisis comes from a desire for certainty about ourselves, each other, and the world around us, but if we can relinquish that then suddenly opportunities present themselves. If we can accept that later everything we did will appear inadequate, if not an utter failure, then we can proceed from the assumption of necessitating different models and practices from time to time.
Uncertainty is uncomfortable but its destabilizing also allows us to question and reinvestigate, to hypothesize and experiment, to theorize and mobilize new ideas. That something has been, does not mean it should still be. That something was relevant does not mean it can’t be retired. That something was accepted does not mean it can’t be altered. The arts and humanities show us this time and time again, ever in crisis and ever surviving, and therein their thriving contemporaneity.
THE ARCHITECT’S NEWSPAPER, “Design-focused exhibitions to check out this fall at galleries and museums across the country,” Emily Conklin, September 2023
“With summer now behind us, fall programming has kicked into full gear with galleries, museums, and cultural institutions staging new exhibitions curated to invoke thought and spark conversation. In the September issue of AN, our editors highlighted four exhibitions on view across the country, among these is a show examining AI […]. From large-scale sculptural pieces to image-forward designs, these exhibitions are feasts for the eyes and mind.
What Models Make Worlds assembles an impressive cast of artists working at the forefront of creative “algorithmic imaginaries,” using them to imagine, reimagine, and critique their world-building abilities. Cocurator Meldia Yesayan said that this exhibition hopes to “rethink how we engage with our communities and imagine a future in which femme-identifying, BIPOC, and queer creators control our algorithmic worlds.” With AI disrupting so many of our systems of production, creativity, and economy, it’s becoming more critical for the “black box” of AI production to open up, and that’s exactly what the work of the 16 represented artists does. Exploring such diverse themes and activities as surveillance, archiving, cultural capital, cartography, and colonialism, the work questions who gets to use, define, and mobilize AI in our world today.”
ARTNET, “See the Provocative A.I. Works in a New Show at the Ford Foundation Gallery That Turn a Critical Eye on the Tool’s Promise—and Its Limits,” Min Chen, October 9, 2023
A new exhibition at the Ford Foundation Gallery is shining new, critical light on artificial intelligence—not just as a hot new tool for artists, but as a system with encoded, and potentially harmful, biases.
“What Models Make Worlds: Critical Imaginaries of A.I.” brings together more than 15 artists whose A.I.-assisted works probe the limits of the technology and envision richer, more diverse models. A.I., after all, is far from a value-neutral tool, but one that replicates the prejudices of the humans that coded it. If A.I. is poised to reshape our digital horizon, the show asks, how just or equitable will that future be?
“Generative A.I. is Janus-faced,” said Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, the show’s co-curator. “On the one hand, it can steer us away from an anthropocentric model of creativity; on the other, it often operates through extractivist labor practices and biased datasets.”
On view in the show are artworks that deal with these technological erasures […]
The exhibition is a restaging of “Encoding Futures,” which was mounted at Oxy Arts in Los Angeles in 2021. In the time since, A.I. has entered popular discourse with the increasing accessibility of generative models, its potential and harms coming newly into focus. This moment is not lost on the show’s curators.
“The stakes of the same works now seem far less conceptual and abstract and much more penetrating,” said co-curator Meldia Yesayan.
CURATOR GUIDE: “What Models Make Worlds: Critical Imaginaries of AI,” Amanda Quinn Olivar, November 2023
“What Models Make Worlds: Critical Imaginaries of AI is a group exhibition featuring artists working across artificial intelligence systems to envision more just futures. The exhibition invites visitors to reflect on how current and future technologies might be otherwise imagined. In this exclusive feature, the show’s curators and select artists talk about their work. […]
Astria Suparak, Artist: The installation White Robot Tears is an array of sympathetic white-coded robots and cyborgs in mainstream science-fiction cinema from Star Wars (1977) and Aliens (1986) to Ex Machina (2014) and Foundation (2021). These white AI agents are imbued with more humanity than the Asian figures used to punctuate the background of the futuristic worlds seen in Virtually Asian, my video embedded within the collage. This work is part of my larger series Asian futures, without Asians, which analyzes over half a century of American science fiction and its repeated techno-Orientalist representations of the future. Drawing from histories of art, architecture, design, fashion, film, food, and weaponry, these projects outline the limits and absurdities and the darker implications of the (well-resourced, heavily platformed) white imaginary.
SURFACE MAGAZINE, “Itinerary: What Models Make Worlds,” Sept. 2023
“In this topical group show, 14 artists imagine the possibilities that could be created by antiracist, decolonial, and feminist AI. After all, AI-driven pattern matching and modeling is used in predictive policing, facial recognition surveillance, and other insidiously opaque applications.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES, “What to See in N.Y.C. Galleries in November,” Travis Diehl, Nov. 10, 2023
This show asks a timely question: Does the software underlying the technology we use — what some broadly, darkly call the Algorithm — have unintended consequences? Yes. We know, for example, that biased datasets can lead facial recognition systems to misidentify Black faces more often than white ones. Skewed models, as the show’s title implies, make unjust worlds. But as these 16 artists here dig deeper, the question quickly becomes a problem: What can art do about it? […] worth seeing for its central insight: Software models answers, while art makes questions.
THE STRAITS TIMES, “Women artists remake science-fiction themes and ideas in ArtScience Museum’s new show,” Ong Sor Fern, Oct. 19, 2023
This exhibition brings together almost 70 works from 24 Asian women artists and collectives tackling the Western, male-dominated genre of science fiction.
Ms Honor Harger, vice-president of the museum and one of the show’s four curators, notes that Western science-fiction concepts such as interdimensional travel, parallel worlds and hybridity are familiar ideas in Asian philosophies and folklore. The artefacts mentioned above — loaned from the Asian Civilisations Museum — in expressing such ideas, help set the stage for this theme. […]
The line-up of artists includes some of the biggest names in contemporary art, such as China’s Cao Fei, India’s Shilpa Gupta and South Korea’s Lee Bul, as well as newer Singaporean artists Chok Si Xuan and Kara Chin.
Co-curated by Ms Harger and her colleagues, Mr Adrian George, Ms Gail Chin and Mr Joel Chin, New Eden tackles various topics across eight sections, showing how women artists have challenged science-fiction narrative tropes as well as reclaimed and remade traditional Asian myths. […]
But while Western science fiction has a tendency towards dystopian visions and confrontational set-ups, she notes that the women artists tend to gesture towards alternative visions which offer more hope.
“Science fiction usually uses the future to tell us about the present. It’s often social commentary. We are seeing this in the artists’ work, that they are insisting on a more inclusive, more utopic world.”
DOCUMENT JOURNAL, “Stephanie Dinkins finds the edges of identity and AI,” Jayne O’Dwyer, November 3, 2023
HYPERALLERGIC, “Fall 2023 New York Art Guide,” Sept. 1, 2023
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RELATED WORKS
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- Virtually Asian (video)
- White Robot Tears (Cry Me An Ocean) (installation)
- Finite Horizon (installation)
- Asian futures, without Asians multipart research series, which includes videos, installations, collages, essays, publications, and other projects
- Check out the posts tagged #scifi
Astria Suparak 