Video screens glow softly from the ground, looping footage of salt lakes, steppe villages, and decaying nuclear take a look at websites. Suspended above them is a big handwoven textile map, crafted by artisans in Kazakhstan. The tapestry maps 12 vital websites throughout Kazakhstan and the encircling area, every equivalent to one of many flickering movies beneath. That is Posthuman Matter: The Map of Nomadizing Reimaginings #3, the newest large-scale set up by photographer and multimedia artist Almagul Menlibayeva.
Lately unveiled on the VRHAM! Digital & Immersive Artwork Biennale in Hamburg, Germany, the work is a part of Menlibayeva’s ongoing sequence of “cyber textiles,” which supply a hanging mix of craft and code. It imagines an alternate cartography of Central Asia, with every video within the set up infusing the places with erased histories and traditions, placing forth an alternate future for them. Whereas the tapestries are created by hand, the movies are a combination of actual and replicated, constructed from documentary footage captured by Menlibayeva after which augmented with AI to infuse feminist rituals, nomadic storytelling traditions, and whispers of endangered languages.
Menlibayeva’s method to synthetic intelligence isn’t rooted in fascination with high-tech innovation for its personal sake. Somewhat, it’s a part of a deeper reckoning — with historical past, with loss, and with the techniques that form how tales are remembered or erased. She engages with AI not as a impartial device, however as a terrain of energy, ideology, and potential transformation. “Maybe my curiosity in synthetic intelligence is rooted within the traumatic historical past of Kazakh nomads,” she says, recalling how Soviet-era collectivization dismantled her ancestors’ lifestyle below the guise of technological progress.
Born in Kazakhstan and educated within the Soviet artwork system, Menlibayeva’s early coaching in folks textiles and Russian futurism is obvious in her layered, hybrid works, which centered on images and multichannel video installations for a few years. Since 2022, she has expanded her apply to incorporate AI, marking a pivotal evolution in her decades-long engagement with themes of historic erasure, cultural survival, and ecological trauma. Throughout these mediums, Menlibayeva critiques the lingering impacts of Soviet rule in Central Asia — from ecological degradation to cultural erasure — whereas reviving Indigenous and nomadic histories lengthy overwritten by empire. With AI, she’s discovered a technique to confront and reanimate these tales.
AI Realism: Qantar 2022 was Menlibayeva’s first mission to include AI. It’s a visceral instance of how she makes use of AI to construct counternarratives. Created in response to the Bloody January protests in Kazakhstan — mass demonstrations that had been violently suppressed by the state and subsequently censored in nationwide media — the mission constructs an artificial memoryscape from collective trauma. Throughout the protests, the Kazakh authorities imposed a near-total web blackout, plunging the nation into an info vacuum.
Confronted with this blockade, Menlibayeva started accumulating protest-2related tales from pals and social media, extracting key phrases in Kazakh and Russian, in addition to voice messages despatched through landlines and cell networks. These fragments of actual speech turned the uncooked materials for AI Realism: Qantar 2022. “The state of affairs itself pushed me, as a result of when these political occasions occurred, the web was shut down in the entire nation,” she remembers. “I used audio recordings of voice messages, phrases these individuals used, to generate photographs of this work.”
Working with text-to-image and voice-to-image fashions through Google Colab, Menlibayeva assembled a sequence of AI-generated photographs from these crowdsourced tales. The ensuing art work, a 24-minute video and a sequence of haunting stills, is nonlinear and emotionally charged, confronting the erasure — each state-sanctioned and in any other case — of the occasions from reminiscence. “I knew that the circumstances, the occasions, could be forgotten or intentionally erased,” she says. “On this work, the individuals’s phrases are the principle materials. That’s the reason the mission is named AI Realism.”
The picture Search and Seizure. Historical past of Kairat Sultanbek. Kazakh January (2022), which is a part of this sequence, reveals a chaos of bloodied surfaces and fragmented our bodies. Nevertheless it resists simple interpretation: there isn’t any clear sequence of occasions and no clear heroes. “AI machines have a big restrict, however generally system errors give rise to fascinating outcomes,” Menlibayeva says. In AI Realism: Qantar 2022, these glitches evoke the ruptures in historical past itself: the erasures, silences, and distortions enforced by each state violence and data-driven platforms.
Menlibayeva’s course of usually begins analog, along with her personal images or video stills — and even embroidered motifs handed down from older generations. These supplies are remodeled utilizing Secure Diffusion, Midjourney, and Perplexity. For video-related work, instruments together with Deforum, Runway, and Kaiber AI are used, however not with out friction. “My first stage is to seek out the proper immediate. Then I select essentially the most appropriate platform primarily based on how nicely it performs for that particular concept. Every platform has its personal strengths, limitations, and biases, so I adapt my method accordingly,” she says.
Whereas some have fun AI’s democratizing potential, Menlibayeva stays cautious. “AI is a posh device with each democratizing potential and the chance of reinforcing new hierarchies,” she warns, noting that “AI techniques are sometimes managed by massive companies, which influences entry and energy.”
So, why use them in any respect? Menlibayeva doesn’t imagine AI creates something actually new, solely what information makes doable. However by inserting her personal photographs, myths, and archives, she sees it as opening a dialogue between algorithmic techniques and human historical past. “AI acts each as a device and a distorted mirror, reflecting the hidden codes, preferences, and limitations of its creators: information, tradition, and energy,” she says. “I consciously interact with these biases, embedding my private mythologies into the method.”
To Menlibayeva, “humanizing AI” doesn’t imply instructing machines to imitate empathy. As a substitute, it means embedding human tales, recollections, and resistance into their logic. In her artwork, AI turns into a technique to recuperate what state archives, historical past books, and dominant media refuse to carry. “That’s the reason, as an artist, I attempt to not obey this logic, however to remodel it. Humanizing AI is just not the duty of programmers, it’s the job of artists,” she says.