Published in 2022, The Institute for Other Intelligences by Mashinka Firunts Hakopian is a work of speculative fiction and media theory about an imagined future where machine intelligences convene annually for curriculum on algorithmic equity.
The book presents a transcript from one of these conferences in which a community of “AI agents” gather at a school for oppositional automata to deliver lectures on the human biases and omissions encoded in their training data. Drawing on feminist, queer, and critical media scholarship, the trainings collected in the book aim to optimize the operations of future generations of intelligent machines toward just outcomes.
Mashinka Firunts Hakopian is an Armenian writer, artist, and researcher born in Yerevan and residing in Glendale, CA. She is an Associate Professor in Technology and Social Justice at ArtCenter College of Design, and holds a PhD in the History of Art from the University of Pennsylvania. With Avi Alpert and Danny Snelson, she makes up one-third of the collective, Research Service. Her writing and commentary appear in Performance Research Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, Meghan Markle’s Archetypes, and elsewhere. Her research focuses on practices that generate alternative imaginaries of the future.
The story unfolds as a series of transcripts from one convening. Readers work inductively, experiencing a future in which the problems of today’s AI are distant memories, solved long ago through thoughtful engagement. Each chapter elaborates on the issues that were critical to address in order to bring about a just world in which algorithmic intelligences proliferate — and the writers, scholars, and artists whose work from the “past” provided the means by which to understand them.
Jesse Damiani, in an interview with Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, published in “How Future Histories Of ‘Other Intelligences’ Clarify Today’s AI” Forbes (August 1, 2023)
Feminist Futurists, with Mashinka Firunts Hakopian and Anuradha Vikram
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ISBN: 978-1-73783-885-2. Published by X Artists’ Books.
