Encoding Futures: Critical Imaginaries of AI assembles the work of artists who visualize the limits of our current algorithmic imaginaries, and envision speculative futures engineered for just outcomes.
Gallery Hours
Monday - Friday — 11am - 4pm
or email oxyarts@oxy.edu to schedule an appointment
Every algorithm encodes a future.
Artificial intelligence structures the sociotechnical terrain of our present, and the human agents who train it shape political imaginaries of what is yet to come. From predictive policing to judicial risk assessment to border surveillance to automated hiring, the encoded biases of AI systems magnify existing structural inequalities. Predictive models don’t forecast a world that might be: they reproduce the world depicted in their training data. They project worlds marked by algorithmic oppression (Safiya Noble), the New Jim Code (Ruha Benjamin), algorithmic violence (Mimi Ọnụọha), and algorithmic coloniality (Shakir Mohamed, Marie-Therese Png, & William Isaac).
Algorithmic worldmaking often unfolds in a “black box”: an opaque space of automated decision-making whose rationale is hidden from public view. Researchers and cultural workers are opening up the black box for scrutiny to imagine possibilities for feminist, antiracist, and decolonial AI. This exhibition assembles the work of artists who visualize the limits of our current algorithmic imaginaries, and envision speculative futures engineered for just outcomes.
Encoding Futures is co-curated by Oxy Arts and Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, Mellon Professor of the Practice at Occidental College.
Exhibiting artists include:
Algorithmic Justice League,Stephanie Dinkins, Aroussiak Gabrielian, Maya Ganesh with Padmini Ray Murray and Pratyush Raman of Design Beku, Kite, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Niama Safia Sandy, Caroline Sinders, Astria Suparak, and Mandy Harris Williams.
The Encoding Futures exhibition will include a physical Reading Room inside the gallery, alongside a digital syllabus that includes readings, podcasts, and resources available to the public.
Activity Guide
Recommended for 4th-8th grade students, the exhibition activity guide features three prompts to further engage with and reflect on the themes presented in the Encoding Futures: Critical Imaginaries of AI exhibition.
Download the Encoding Futures Reflection + Activity Guide
Exhibition and programming made possible with the generous support of the Remsen Bird Fund.
The exhibition is staged in conjunction with Encoding Futures: Speculative Monuments for LA, a 3-month virtual residency program at Oxy Arts. Over the residency period, artists Nancy Baker-Cahill, Audrey Chan, Joel Garcia with Meztli Projects and Patrick Martinez researched and developed original virtual monuments to be geo-located at sites across Los Angeles. The monuments will be accessible for the public to view through the 4th Wall app. The prompt for the residency was to conceive a blueprint for a site-specific imagined future, and consider technologically enabled transformations that might shape the future of the chosen site. The artists considered past and present social, economic, and cultural inequities, power imbalances, and other forms of subjection, with the hope of foregrounding a radically equitable future sited in an emergent present.
Image Credit:
Detail from Astria Suparak's Asian futures, without Asians series, with image from Ghost in the Shell, 2020-Present
Event Programming
Thursday, September 16 | 4-8pm
Opening Reception
Friday, September 17 | 12:15pm
Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism | Lecture by Safiya Umoja Noble
Sunday, September 19 | 11am
Launch Event | Encoding Futures: Speculative Monuments for L.A.
Thursday, September 30 | 7pm
Curatorial Walkthrough with Mashinka Firunts Hakopian
Thursday, October 7 | 7pm
Panel Discussion | Encoding Futures: Speculative Monuments for LA
Thursday, October 21 | 7pm
Workshop | Stop LAPD Spying Coalition
Saturday, October 30 | 1-4pm
Virtual Symposium | Encoding Futures: Speculative Blueprints for Critical AI
Thursday, November 4 | 7pm
Lecture-Performance | Mandy Harris Williams
Saturday, November 6 | 4pm
Curatorial Walkthrough with Mashinka Firunts Hakopian
Sunday, November 14 | 2-4pm
Workshop | Feminist AI
