firstdraft
0

Soft Power

AI Redacted

Janet Bi Li Chan

2021, digital text.
Commissioned by Firstdraft. Courtesy the artist.

Soft Power presents experimental responses, new critiques and speculative futures in the face of myriad power systems we must confront and dismantle. Like her peers, Janet Bi Li Chan explores what is obscured and nullified in emergent and established systems of power.

AI Redacted is an experiment in erasure poetry which continues a tradition of creating of ‘found’ poetry through erasing a large portion of an existing text, in this case a 1986 technical report from New York University titled The Limits of Artificial Intelligence by Jacob T Schwartz. Erasure is a subtractive and transgressive process, but also an additive and collaborative one. The transformation of a technical report into a poetic form is both disruptive and playful, an invitation to craft new meanings from old text. Pages of the report are reimagined as a palimpsest of scientific ideas turned provocative; the text floats on top of a layer of AI-generated images, hinting at an unanticipated, if not dystopian, future.

Janet is a Sydney-based artist, poet and award-winning researcher. She holds a PhD in criminology and an MFA in drawing and painting. Her creative works explore issues of surveillance, control, data technology and social injustice. Her contribution to the Soft Power project—a series of erasure poems—draws on her research on the social impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI). As one of the latest technological tools that promise greater efficiency and effectiveness in decision-making, AI has infiltrated both public and private institutions, its reach is mostly invisible and its adverse social impact only recently acknowledged and investigated.

 

explore more of Soft Power

Featured
Teeny tiny, itty bitty, super duper, big
Teeny tiny, itty bitty, super duper, big

Melody Paloma

Teeny tiny, itty bitty, super duper, big interrogates the violence of settler colonial aesthetics. The poem circulates around the concept of colonial kitsch and its relationship to mythmaking, monument and extraction.

Evasion Score
Evasion Score

Roslyn Orlando

Evasion Score is a downloadable graphic score and video demonstration that proposes ways of using the voice to evade detection from domestic smart speakers. Various vocal techniques are used to prevent speakers from 'listening' to and understanding speech.

Wonnarua
Wonnarua

Ryan Andrew Lee

Wonnarua is a contemplative moving image installation work that aims to provoke discussion around themes of Indigenous ways of living in juxtaposition with western settler-state system's unsustainable, damaging ways of using stolen lands.

Ledger
Ledger

Lou Garcia-Dolnik

Entertaining the possibility that Bitcoin mining’s colonial-capitalist apparatus may too set its claws in The Philippines, Ledger wrestles with the impossibility of imagining a homeland always-already imminently ruined by technocapitalism.

Which Way?
Which Way?

Nicholas Aloisio-Shearer

Enter a strange world and find a way to charm the three manifestations of online masculinity that will vie for your affections! Will you be able to discover a way to live in this world you have found yourself in? Experience corporeal bliss in one of five different endings or uncover the secret path to transcendence.

AI Redacted
AI Redacted

Janet Bi Li Chan

AI Redacted is an experiment in erasure poetry that continues a tradition of creating ‘found’ poetry through erasing a large portion of an existing text - in this case, a 1986 technical report from New York University titled The Limits of Artificial Intelligence by Jacob T Schwartz.

There is no ocean sound when I hold this to my ear
There is no ocean sound when I hold this to my ear

Talia Smith

This work explores the disconnection between Aotearoa, the artist’s place of birth and ancestral homelands, and Sydney, where she currently resides – and the familial ties that keep her precariously grounded.

Firstdraft