Abundant Intelligences

A project of the Indigenous Futures Research Center
May – June, 2023

Made possible by Montalvo Art Center’s Lucas Artists Program and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

About

The Abundant Intelligences Residency will provide a sustained period of individual and collective engagement with creative responses to the challenge of designing AI systems that support Indigenous flourishing. The goal will be to produce future imaginaries that illustrate the abundant diversity of how humans interact intelligently with the world, and to illuminate how such intelligences might be expressed through computational systems.

Questions about the ethical design of AI have taken on a particular urgency. The need to think carefully and widely about the ethical underpinnings of such systems is underscored by issues such as pervasive algorithmic bias against women, minorities, and the poor; the automation of systems for evaluating human behaviour; and the use of machine systems to perform lethal policing of human lives.

The flaws ingrained in the current trajectory of AI development are the result of Western rationalist epistemologies, and such ways of knowing are not a sufficient foundation on which to adequately, robustly and humanely conceptualize intelligence, much less attempt to replicate it. What is required are more expansive imaginations, frameworks, and languages to effectively engage with the new machine ontologies.

The Residency is focused foremost on Indigenous people in North America and the Pacific (e.g., Kanaka Maoli, Anishnaabe, Lakota, Maori), though we anticipate including participants from other areas of Indigenous presence. These communities have experienced long histories of Western technology being used against them; yet many are interested in co-designing such systems, in part to ensure that the technology is used to our benefit but also because we have long traditions of both technical innovation and innovative knowledge frameworks that contain rich conceptual tools for understanding deep and rich relationships with other-than-humans.

Both these histories help form a foundation for asking: What should our relationship with AI be? How can Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies contribute to the global conversation regarding society and AI? How do we imagine a future with AI that contributes to the flourishing of all humans and non-humans? How can the answers to such questions translate into design guidelines for those building AI?

The Residency will build on the model created by the Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence (IP AI) Workshops held in the winter/spring of 2019. The Residency will be Indigenous-led with a majority of Indigenous participants, be international in scope, use Indigenous methodologies that prioritize community health and well-being, and be widely transdisciplinary, with artists, scholars, and technologists working from community, academic and industry contexts. The IP AI workshops also highlighted how art helps makes different protocols, frameworks, and practices legible across communities, disciplines and scales, and that it is a core critical method for meeting the challenge of how to effectively imagine futures that entail deeply transdisciplinary thinking.

Outcomes and Facilities

The Residency will result in a collection of artworks that actively engage the questions above, and an artists’ book which will document those artworks, their creation process, and the experience of the residency itself. We will commission several essays to accompany the book. We will also invite a film documentarian to be one of the residents, who will be asked to create a long-form documentary about the residency to serve as a reference for future artists and researchers.

The Residency will engage the full spectrum of Montalvo’s facilities. Participants will inhabit the ten live/work studios on the premises, and the broad range of creative disciplines will ensure that the rich range of technical and space resources at Montalvo will be engaged.

Abundant Intelligences Residency: Expanding the (Indigenous) AI Imaginary

Supported in part by the Andy Warhol Foundation, hosted by the Lucas Artists Residency Program at Montalvo Arts Center and produced in collaboration with the Indigenous Futures Research Centre.