I see speculation and imaginaries as interesting objects for examining our values, norms, and onto-epistemological orientations, and I think they have both the capacity to actively transform our thinking and future-making, but also to provide rich material to reflect on in terms of our societal and individual situated perspectives and tensions within them. My work is directed towards addressing the structures that work towards oppressing; gendering, racialization, and disregard for non-humans (which also ties to the environmental crisis that serves as a gloomy backdrop of our times) - in the situated context of emerging AI art technologies. My work has included speculative first-person and workshop projects to explore probable, possible, and alternative pathways for AI Art technologies. In my presentation, I will describe my recent research works related to this. In the first work, through first-person speculation I imagined AI Art tools that would incorporate post-humanist and feminist care ethics orientation, exposing tensions in how the care of non-humans is not present in the artifacts/technologies and the peoples' mental landscapes. For the second study, I organized speculative sketching workshops, in which artists and engineers imagined future AI art tools for their own practice, and discussed critical considerations for these imaginary tools. Following this, I analyzed these imaginary tools from the perspective of what values and labor arrangements are embedded in them. A third research project that I am currently working on is focused on imaginary research abstracts: organizing workshops in which scientists (computational creativity scholars) write fictional future research paper abstracts. These abstracts are then critically discussed and analyzed from the perspective of values, ideologies, ontologies, and epistemologies that are embedded in them.To conclude, I see speculation and imaginaries as interesting objects for examining our situated orientations, directing my work towards addressing the structures that work towards oppressing; gendering, racialization, and disregard for non-humans.
QC 20231009