Artist contributions to the Better Images of AI library have always served an important role to foster understanding and critical thinking about AI technologies and their context. Images facilitate deeper inquiries into the nature of AI, its history, and ethical, social, political and legal implications.
When artists create better images of AI, they often have to grapple with these narratives in their attempts to more realistically portray the technology and point towards its strengths and weaknesses. Furthermore, as artists freely share these images in our library, others can benefit from learning about the artist’s own internal motivations (which are provided in image descriptions) but the images can also inspire users’ own musings.
In our blog series, “Through My Eyes”, some of our volunteer stewards take turns selecting an image from the Archival Images of AI collection. They delve into the artist’s creative process and explore what the image means to them—seeing it through their own eyes.
At the end of 2024, we released the Archival Images of AI Playbook with AIxDESIGN and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. The playbook explores how existing images – especially those from digital heritage collections – can help us craft more meaningful visual narratives about AI. Through various image-makers’ own attempts to make better images of AI, the playbook shares numerous techniques which can teach you how to transform existing images into new creations.
Here, Laura Martinez Agudelo shares her personal reflections on ‘Weaving Wires 1’ – Hanna Barakat’s own better image of AI that was created for the playbook. Laura comments on how the image uncovers the hidden Navajo women’s labor behind the assembly of microchips in Silicon Valley – inviting us to confront the oppressive cultural conditions of conception, creation and mediation of the technology industry’s approach to innovation.
Cables came out and crossed my mind
Weaving wires 1 by Hanna Barakat is about hidden histories of computer labor. As it is explained in the image’s description, her digital collage is inspired by the history of computing in the 1960s in Silicon Valley, where the Fairchild Semiconductor company employed Navajo women for intensive tasks such as assembling microchips. Their work (actually with their hands and their digits) was a way for these women to provide for their families in an economically marginalized context.
At that time, this labor was made to be seen as a way to legitimize the transfer of the weaving cultural practices to contribute to technological innovation. This legitimation appears to be an illusion, to converge the unchanging character of weaving as heritage, with the constant renewal of global industry, but it also presupposes the non-recognition of Navajo women’s labor and a techno-cultural and gendered transaction. Their work is diluted in meaning and action, and overlooked in the history of computing.
In Weaving wires 1, we can see a computer monitor with circuit board patterns on the screen, and a juxtaposed woven design. Then, two potential purposes dialogue with the woman sitting at the edge of the screen, suspended in a white background: is the woman stitching or fixing or even both as she weaves and prolongs the wires? These blue wires extend from the monitor, keyboard and beyond. The woman seems to be modifying or constructing a digital landscape with her own hands, leading us to remember the place where these materialities come from, and the memories they connect to.
Since my mother tongue is Spanish, a distant memory of the word “Navajo” and the image of weaving women appeared. “Navajo” is a Spanish adaptation of the Tewa Pueblo word navahu’u, which means “farm fields in the valley”. The Navajo people call themselves Diné, literally meaning “The People”. At this point, I began to think about the specific socio-spatial conditions of Navajo/Diné women at that time and their misrepresentation today. When I first saw the collage, I felt these cables crossing my own screen. Many threads began to unravel in my head in the form of question marks. I wondered how older and younger generations of Navajo/Diné women have experienced (and in other ways inherited) this hidden labor associated with the transformation of the valley and their community. This image disrupts as a visual opposition to the geographic and social identification of Silicon Valley as presented, for example, in the media. So now, these wires expand the materiality to reveal their history. Hanna creatively represents the connection between key elements of this theme. Let’s explore some of her artistic choices.
Recoded textures as visual extensions
Hanna Barakat is a researcher, artist and activist who studies emerging technologies and their social impact. I discovered her work thanks to the Archival Images of AI project (Launch & Playtest). Weaving wires 1 is part of a larger project from Hanna where a creative dialogue between textures and technology is proposed. Hanna plays with intersections of visual forms to raise awareness of the social, racial and gender issues behind technologies. Weaving wires 1 reconnected me with the importance of questioning the human and material extractive conditions in which technological devices are produced.
As a lecturer in (digital) communication, I’m often looking for visual support on topics such as the socio-economic context in which the Internet appears, the evolution of the Web, the history of computer culture, and socio-technical theories and examples to study technological innovation, its problems and ethical challenges. The visual narratives are mostly uniform, and the graphic references are also gendered. Women’s work is most of the time misrepresented (no, those women in front of the big computers are not just models or assistants, they have full names and they are the official programmers and coders. Take a look at the work of Kathy/Kathryn Kleiman… Unexplored archives are waiting for us !).
When I visually interacted with Weaving wires 1 and read its source of inspiration (I actually used and referenced the image for one of my lectures), I realized once again the need to make visible the herstory (term coined in the 1960s as a feminist critique of conventional historiography) of technological innovation. Sometimes, in the rush of life in general (and in specific moments like the preparation of a lecture in my case), we forget to take some time and distance to convene other ways of exploring and sharing knowledge (with the students) and to recreate the modalities of approaching some essential topics for a better understanding of the socio-technical metamorphosis of our society.
Going beyond assumed landmarks
In order to understand hidden social realities, we might question our own landmarks. For me, “landmarks” could be both consciously (culturally) confirmed ideas and visual/physical evidence of the existence of boundaries or limits in our (representation of) reality. Hanna’s image proposes an insight into the importance of going beyond some established landmarks. This idea, as a result of the artistic experience, highlights some questions such as : where did the devices we use every day come from and whose labour created them? And in what others forms are these conditions extended through time and space, and for whom ? You might have some answers, references, examples, or even names coming to mind right now.
In Weaving wires 1, and in Hanna’s artistic contribution, several essential points are raised. Some of them are often missing in discourses and practices of emerging technologies like AI systems : the recognition of the human labor that supports the material realities of technological tools, the intersection of race and gender, the roots of digital culture and industry, and the need to explore new visual narratives that reflect technology’s real conditions of production.
Fix, reconnect and reimagine
Hanna uses the digital collage (but also techniques such as juxtaposition, overlayering and/or distortion – she explains her approach with examples in her artist log). She explores ways to honor the stories she conjures up by rejecting colonial discourses. For me, in the case of Weaving wires 1, these wires connect to our personal experiences with technological devices and memories of the digital transformation of our society. They could also represent the need to imagine and construct together, as citizens, more inclusive (technological) futures.
A digital landscape is somewhere there, or right in front of us. Weaving wires 1 will be extended by Hanna in Weaving wives 2 to question the meaning of the valley landscape itself and its borders. For now, some other transversal questions appear (still inspired by her first image) about deterministic approaches to studying data-driven technology and its intersection with society: what fragments or temporalities of our past are we willing and able to deconstruct? Which ones filter the digital space and ask for other ways of understanding? How can we reconnect with the basic needs of our world if different forms of violence (physical and symbolic), in this case in human labor, are not only hidden, but avoided, neglected or unrepresented in the socio-digital imaginary?
It is such a necessary discussion to face our collective memory and the concrete experiences in between. Weaving wires 1 invites us to confront the oppressive cultural conditions of conception, creation and mediation of the technology industry’s approach to innovation.With this image, Hanna brings us a meaningful contribution. She deconstructs simplistic assumptions and visual perspectives to actually create ‘better images of AI’!
About the author
Laura Martinez Agudelo is a Temporary Teaching and Research Assistant (ATER) at the University Marie & Louis Pasteur – ELLIADD Laboratory. She holds a PhD in Information and Communication Sciences. Her research interests include socio-technical devices and (digital) mediations in the city, visual methods and modes of transgression and memory in (urban) art.
This post was also kindly edited by Tristan Ferne – lead producer/researcher at BBC Research & Development.
If you want to contribute to our new blog series, ‘Through My Eyes’, by selecting an image from the Archival Images of AI collection and exploring what the image means to you, get in touch (info@betterimagesofai.org)
