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California Institute of the Arts

Ancestral Intelligences with Mashinka Firunts Hakopian

CHANEL Center for Artists and Technology

Event Information

Date: Apr. 9

Time: 4:30 PM

Location: CalArts Campus; Main Gallery

About:

Presented by the CHANEL Center for Artists and Technology (CCAT).

Whose knowledge systems do algorithms inherit? Attending to the knowledge we encode in our technologies, this talk focuses on a recent collaboration by the artist entitled Բաժակ Նայող (One Who Looks at the Cup). The project uses a community-generated dataset to train an AI model to perform coffee reading and output bilingual predictions in Armenian and English — imagining multilingual, community-driven models of computational worldmaking. Snacks provided.

Part of the Our Intelligences: Shattering the Black Box of AI talks on April 9.

In conversation with Susie Zhu (MFA 1 Art & Technology, Creative Writing).

photo of Mashinka Firunts Hakopian

About Mashinka Firunts Hakopian

Mashinka Firunts Hakopian is an Associate Professor at ArtCenter College of Design, a 2025-27 Vera List Center Fellow at the New School, and a 2024-25 Cambridge Visual Culture Visiting Research Fellow. Her book, The Institute for Other Intelligences, was published through X Artists’ Books in 2022. Her writing has appeared in Feminist Media Histories, AI & Society, Los Angeles Review of Books, Performance Research Journal, and elsewhere. Her projects and collaborations have been presented or are forthcoming at the Centre Pompidou, the Asian Art Biennial, New Museum, REDCAT, the Music Center LA, MASS MoCA, and elsewhere. With Meldia Yesayan, she is the co-curator of What Models Make Worlds: Critical Imaginaries of AI at the Ford Foundation Gallery and Encoding Futures at OXY ARTS. With Sarah Higgins, she co-edited the Spring 2023 ART PAPERS special issue on artificial intelligence.