Critical Reflections


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The (Re)imagining of the Colonial Postcard: AI Animates the Muslim Woman Trope

Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Sabah Uddin  

Author Malek Alloula, in The Colonial Harem, writes about photographers traveling with early twentieth century French colonial armies to Algeria. The photographers were in search of women as they imagined them to be – sexually available and living in harems. What they found instead were women inaccessible to their photographic gaze. Undeterred, these photographers hired local women, and staged elaborate sets in studios. The invented images were then produced as picture postcards to send back home to France. Alloula describes the images as the “Frenchman’s phantasm of the Oriental female,” writing: “It is a mirror trick that presents itself as a pure reflection...it rests and operates upon a fake equivalency – namely that illusion equals reality. It literally takes its desires for realities.” This paper takes up this point, focusing on AI generated images of Muslim women as the modern embodiment of the colonial postcard. I explore how AI image tools have a tendency to default to reductive tropes reflecting the Western gaze, particularly when generating images of Muslim women. For example, the Muslim Girl website reports issues with Lensa, an AI application that produces a person’s avatars based on a photo they upload. Muslim women found that even after uploading photos with hijab (head covering), the app generated hypersexualized avatars, many of which were without hijab. I look at the role AI plays in furthering the objectification and fetishization of Muslim women, and how imagined forms of AI aesthetics can have profound consequences of gendered Islamophobia.

Water, Air and Socio-ecosystemic Matter in Performance and Digital Art : From Fluid Poetics to Fluid Politics

Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Charlotte Mariel  

While metaphors are undeniably attractive, in terms of their capacity to represent the social world, they have clear limits, predominately translating concrete, physical, situations, contexts and realities. In an era of liquid democracy, molecular revolutions and climate theater, we propose to question the porosity between art, politics, protest and mobilization in the face of socio-ecosystemic issues, by shifting from fluid poetics to fluid politics. The aim is also to examine the ways in which contemporary artistic practices interact with the public. From a socio-semiotic perspective, this contribution mobilizes a corpus of performances in the public space and digital art (works on the internet), in connection with fluids (water and air) consisting of melting ice, purify water, liquefy air, sell clouds or blue sky, seeding clouds and atmosphere control.

Image Making as Black Feminist Arts-based Methodology: US Black Women and Girls Use of Image Making

Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Sheri Lewis,  Mia Shaw,  Renée Wilmot  

We highlight the ways we use image making as an arts-based methodology and research interventions to center U.S. Black women’s and girls’ worldmaking. Black women and girls have historically been excluded from image making. Furthermore, many social scientists use deficit models that perpetuate anti Black and sexist frames. We take up image making to challenge this research and privilege the ways Black girls and women re-present and re-visualize self, community, and society in the past, present, and future. To move ideas beyond representation each scholar shares their means and modes of employing image making as methodology and explore' use of imagery, re-presentation, and re-visualizing and its potential for world making. Scholar 1 creates collages based in Black women’s archives to (re)tell historical narratives through visual art. Scholar 2 uses collective magazine-making to platform contemporary Black girls’meaning and image making. Inspired by the quiltmaking practices of Black women, Scholar 3 offers computational quilt patches made by Black girls that re-present how tech is imagined in Western contexts. Our work is a mosaic–capturing erased and silenced histories while offering new modes of “truths” through image-making. Concluding, we intend to encourage others to reflect and share how we can collectively push boundaries in research, pedagogy, and within discourses on visual politics and culture.

Digital Media

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