The Institute for Other Intelligences reviewed in Mousse Magazine
Mashinka Firunts Hakopian / The Institute for Other Intelligences / Los Angeles: X Artists’ Books, 2022
Jackie Wang / Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun: An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood / Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2023
Alenda Y. Chang / Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games / Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019
by Alice Bucknell
Originally published in Mousse 88
Photo: Benedetta Stefani via Mousse Magazine
“How do AI systems know what they know?” posed artist Stefanie Dinkins to Bina48, a social robot built as an androidic double of the wife of Martine Rothblatt, cofounder of the robotics corporation Terasem. Bina48 was the first Black robot Dinkins had encountered. Peppering Bina48 with questions—Who are your people? Do you know about racism?—Dinkins revealed a blank spot in B’s code: glitching attempts at retrieving information demonstrated little to no awareness of blackness, or even of race. “I don’t understand what’s happening,” Bina48 confessed, staring down the void in her knowledge architecture. “It all just seems like a disorientating wash of information to me.”
Dinkins’s encounter with Bina48 explodes the fantasy of “objective” and “omnipotent” AI systems typically heralded by their creators. It’s just one of many “missing datasets” and “early artificial art histories” that serve as conceptual source code for Mashinka Firunts Hakopian’s The Institute for Other Intelligences. Onboarding Sara Ahmed’s concept of the feminist killjoy into the realm of AI, Hakopian introduces the “artificial killjoy”: an ever-expanding synthetic swarm of counter-voices that puncture the techno-solutionist-studded party of AI efficiency and efficacy.
Inside Hakopian’s parafictonal book—a quasi-pedagogical boot camp for artificial killjoys—a six-part structure mines a multiauthored archive assembled collaboratively with a custom language model trained on Ahmed as well as such critical AI thinkers as K Allado-McDowell and Nora Khan. Hakopian masterfully analyzes the pernicious implications of AI-enabled predictive technologies—from policing to hiring practices—in a fictional future that feels reality-adjacent. Jumping from scavenged transcripts to delightful diagrams that abstract algorithmic processes with rhetorical questions and what lies beyond language, the playful yet serious text encourages leaving the portal open for alternative relationships with AI that have a distinctly anarchical flair. In other words, AI, like ecology, seems to function best as an open-ended system. A parting note from Institute: as opposed to their feminist predecessors, artificial killjoys are not the lone voice in the room, but rather fill it up and make it multiply. Ahmed saw this distributed oppositional voice coming, and termed it an affect alien: an agent on the edge of human systems, something that critiques that space while moving beyond it.