Quarantined AI

June 24, 2020

Quarantined AI is an exploration at the intersection of art, technology, and nature rooted in the context of our current reality in the era of COVID-19. It is a collection of art that explores how artificial intelligence might imagine the outdoor world after an indoor "quarantine" and reimagine our indoor living spaces with elements of the outdoor world.

Problem Statement

Ownership of Dominant Narratives about AI

Dominant narratives around Artificial Intelligence (AI) are owned by actors in STEM and Silicon Valley. When technology and tools are not engaged enough in spaces outside of tech, it enables a small group of privileged people (Silicon Valley tech community) to unevenly claim ownership over issues of ethics and social practices that affect everyone. Such is the case with AI technology.

In tech, AI is predominantly applied to predict human behavior, determine digital experiences, and automate social processes in many contemporary software platforms. Numerous studies and critiques have problematized the lack of processes, structure, and importance around ethical considerations of AI in dominant tech companies of Silicon Valley.

The Role of Technology during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed a unique window for the Silicon Valley tech community to engineer, promote, and establish the digital experiences that humans around the world are using now as alternative means to physical interaction and in-person social participation. Over the past few months, main actors in the Silicon Valley tech industry demonstrated how rapidly companies can iterate on digital tools and deploy solutions when the dominant narrative deems it necessary. For example, Zoom enabling universal work-from-home culture is something that was always possible but only realized in the past few months because society at large demonstrated a profitable need for it.

Provocation

How many other such technology-driven solutions and futures are possible, but not being realized because those in power don’t see profitable need? Particularly, how might we engage current AI technology with art to reflect on the human condition, as an act of dismantling and reconfiguring the narrative control around AI technology?

Just like other successful critical tech interventions (such as the Transborder Immigrant Tool, which “confounds systems of political control, creating a call to action that resonated internationally, and using poetry to ‘dissolve’ the US-Mexico border”), there is an opportunity to confound the systems of technological control dictated by Silicon Valley and use visual art to unsettle our current systems.

Participate

Want to transform your images into Quarantined AI art? Share your quarantined images here. Your valuable contribution can become a part of the first crowd-sourced dataset in the Quarantined AI project! Additionally, your anonymized contributions may be featured by the Life in Quarantine project.