Montalvo Residency Report
About
The first Abundant intelligences-related residency was held at the Montalvo Art Center in May/June 2023. The residency provided a sustained period of individual and collective engagement with creative responses to the challenge of designing AI systems that support Indigenous flourishing. The goal was 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, all within a context of Indigenous thinking, making, and relationship-building.
The Residency took as its inspiration the Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence (IP AI) Workshops held in the winter & spring of 2019. The IP AI workshops highlighted how art helps make 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. The Residency aspired to a similar dynamic: it was Indigenous-led with a majority of Indigenous participants, international in scope, drew upon Indigenous methodologies that prioritize community health and well-being, and was widely transdisciplinary, with artists, scholars, and technologists working from community and academic contexts.
Prompts
1.
As Indigenous people and individuals from allied communities, what should our relationship with AI be?
2.
How can Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies contribute to the global conversation regarding society and AI?
3.
How do we imagine a future with AI that contributes to the flourishing of all humans and non-humans?
4.
How can the answers to such questions translate into design guidelines for those building AI?
Outcomes
Discussion topics
1.
Entanglement of materiality and discursivity: In the will to translate Indigenous knowledge systems and map Indigenous concepts to other forms of knowledge, what constitutive exclusions emerge within the materialization of a culture?
2.
Centering relationality: Cross-disciplinary reflection on the Indigenous notions of relationality and how they shape one’s relationships differently.
3.
Language as epistemology: Significance of linguistics and how the structure of a language shapes and reflects its culture.
4.
Science as ritual: the importance of contextuality and a holistic approach to subject-matter study and retaining a notion of the sacred while thinking through extractivism in digital contexts.
5.
Multidimensional epistemologies: Indigenous approach to dreams as coded intelligence and how space-based spirituality applies to the imagining of futurity.
Residents
Co-organizers
•
Suzanne Kite (Lakȟóta)
•
Jason Edward Lewis (Kanaka Maoli)
•
Scott Benesiinaabandan (Anishnaabe)
Participants
•
Archer Pechawis (Nêhiyawak)
•
Bobby Joe Smith III (Lakȟóta)
•
Bryan Kamoali Kuwada (Kanaka Maoli)
•
Jackson TwoBears (Kanien’kehá:ka)
•
Lisa Jackson (Anishnaabe)
•
Laura Harjo (Mvskoke)
•
Taylor McArthur (Nakota)
•
Vanessa Racine (Anishnaabe)
Hosts
•
Kelly Sicat - Residency Director, Montalvo Arts Center
•
Judy Dennis - Residency Manager, Montalvo Arts Center
•
Patrick Ip - Residency Chef, Montalvo Arts Center
Funders
Montalvo Residency Report
About
The first Abundant intelligences-related residency was held at the Montalvo Art Center in May/June 2023. The residency provided a sustained period of individual and collective engagement with creative responses to the challenge of designing AI systems that support Indigenous flourishing. The goal was 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, all within a context of Indigenous thinking, making, and relationship-building.
The Residency took as its inspiration the Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence (IP AI) Workshops held in the winter & spring of 2019. The IP AI workshops highlighted how art helps make 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. The Residency aspired to a similar dynamic: it was Indigenous-led with a majority of Indigenous participants, international in scope, drew upon Indigenous methodologies that prioritize community health and well-being, and was widely transdisciplinary, with artists, scholars, and technologists working from community and academic contexts.
Prompts
1.
As Indigenous people and individuals from allied communities, what should our relationship with AI be?
2.
How can Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies contribute to the global conversation regarding society and AI?
3.
How do we imagine a future with AI that contributes to the flourishing of all humans and non-humans?
4.
How can the answers to such questions translate into design guidelines for those building AI?
Outcomes
Discussion topics
1.
Entanglement of materiality and discursivity: In the will to translate Indigenous knowledge systems and map Indigenous concepts to other forms of knowledge, what constitutive exclusions emerge within the materialization of a culture?
2.
Centering relationality: Cross-disciplinary reflection on the Indigenous notions of relationality and how they shape one’s relationships differently.
Residents
Co-organizers
•
Suzanne Kite (Lakȟóta)
•
Jason Edward Lewis (Kanaka Maoli)
•
Scott Benesiinaabandan (Anishnaabe)
Participants
•
Archer Pechawis (Nêhiyawak)
•
Bobby Joe Smith III (Lakȟóta)
•
Bryan Kamoali Kuwada (Kanaka Maoli)
•
Jackson TwoBears (Kanien’kehá:ka)
•
Lisa Jackson (Anishnaabe)
•
Laura Harjo (Mvskoke)
•
Taylor McArthur (Nakota)
•
Vanessa Racine (Anishnaabe)
Hosts
•
Kelly Sicat - Residency Director, Montalvo Arts Center
•
Judy Dennis - Residency Manager, Montalvo Arts Center
•
Patrick Ip - Residency Chef, Montalvo Arts Center
Funders