The Institute for Other Intelligences
In The Institute for Other Intelligences, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian brings speculative fiction and media studies to bear on an imagined future where machine intelligences convene annually for curriculum on algorithmic equity. The book presents a transcript from one of these conferences in which a community of "AI agents" gather at a school for oppositional automata to deliver lectures on the human biases and omissions encoded in their training data. The resulting manuscript, published on the occasion of the Institute's millennial anniversary, revisits sociotechnical systems from its founding in the 21st century. Drawing on feminist, queer, and critical media scholarship, the trainings collected in the book aim to optimize the operations of future generations of intelligent machines toward just outcomes. Hakopian uses these speculative exchanges to invite the reader to consider how critical approaches to nonhuman intelligence might reroute our current path toward destructive technofutures and allow us to conceive of another way forward.
Edited by Ana Iwataki and Anuradha Vikram for X Topics, The Institute for Other Intelligences includes an introduction by Vikram and diagrammatic illustrations by Fernando Diaz, a scientist whose work focuses on the quantitative evaluation and algorithmic design of information access systems.
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Mashinka Firunts Hakopian is an Armenian writer, artist, and researcher born in Yerevan and residing in Glendale, CA. She is an Associate Professor in Technology and Social Justice at ArtCenter College of Design, and holds a PhD in the History of Art from the University of Pennsylvania. With Avi Alpert and Danny Snelson, she makes up one-third of the collective, Research Service. Her writing and commentary appear in Performance Research Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, Meghan Markle's Archetypes, and elsewhere. Her research focuses on practices that generate alternative imaginaries of the future.
Ana Iwataki is a writer, curator, and organizer from and based in Los Angeles. She is a PhD student in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at the University of Southern California. As a community organizer, she is embedded in a history of art and activism in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles.
Fernando Diaz is a scientist whose work focuses on the quantitative evaluation and algorithmic design of information access systems, including search engines and recommender systems. His recent research concerns understanding the broader societal implications of artificial intelligence and related technology.
Anuradha Vikram is a writer, curator, and educator based in Los Angeles, CA. Vikram's book Decolonizing Culture (Sming Sming Books, 2017) contributed to a global movement to decolonize arts institutions and monuments. They have written for art periodicals and publications from Paper Monument, Heyday Press, Routledge, and Oxford University Press. They are an Editorial Board member at X-TRA, and faculty in the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture. They hold an MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts and a BS in Studio Art from NYU.
