Nouf Aljoywasir is a new media artist, who explores our ever changing relationship with artificial intelligence systems and algorithms. With the widespread adoption of ChatGPT and advancements in AI, these technologies are being integrated into private and personal aspects of our lives. We are turning to algorithms for insights into our identities and the challenges we face. This raises crucial questions about inclusivity and the biases of these technologies: whom do they benefit, and whom do they ignore? Nouf poses intimate questions to AI tools, challenging their conventional utility, and studying their underlying mechanisms or "black boxes." She juxtaposes AI processing with non-Western knowledge traditions like oral storytelling, highlighting the differences between AI's simplification and ancestral narrative preservation practices. Through this artistic exploration, she encourages a critical examination of what we consider to be "intelligence" in algorithms, questioning their logic and how they shift our perception of reality. Her work highlights how artificial intelligence, through a lens of Western reductionism, overlooks and diminishes the richness of non-Western ancestral legacies, reshaping our collective memory.
"Nouf Aljowaysir’swork highlights the biases within the AI systems that are unable to correctly identify the widespread traditional Saudi clothing and focus on stereotypical images of war-torn Baghdad and Western visions of Saudi Arabia, without paying attention to the local portrayals. These are more frequently passed on through the oral tradition as opposed to image documentation and are therefore missing from the datasets used to train AI systems, something the artist underscores by removing parts of images, where we would expect to see a person or an element of clothing. Aljowaysir assumes the role of a storyteller, visually narrating her exploration of her own heritage through her interaction with AI systems and their stereotypes, captured in her film Ana Min Wein: Where am I from?."
Excerpt from Post-Photography: The Uncanny Valley, an Essay by Luba Elliott