“Reinventing the Colonial Gaze Employing AI: a Case Study” presented by Koutsomichalis and Achilleos

Symposium:

• ISEA2022: 27th International Symposium on Electronic Art

• Digital Preservation: Resignifying Memory and Oblivion

• Reinventing the Colonial Gaze Employing AI: a Case Study

• Marinos Koutsomichalis
• Alexia Achilleos

Venue(s):

• CCCB: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

• This short paper accounts for a case study of artistic research revolving around Cyprus’ colonial past and inspired by present day decolonial affairs. The endeavour pivots on a hybrid AI system, trained on text from colonial handbooks of Cyprus (originally published when Cyprus was still part of the British Empire) and employing a custom image dataset meant to reflect this colonial view of the island. AI then generates new colonial ‘gazes’ of Cyprus upon demand. Output text and imagery is used in a number of physical and digital artefacts and events that are presented herein.

Keywords:

• Digital Colonialism
• Decolonisation
• GANs
• Text to Image Synthesis
• Text Synthesis

Category:

• Paper
• Short Paper