Video screens glow softly from the ground, looping footage of salt lakes, steppe villages, and decaying nuclear check 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 comparable 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.
Not too long ago 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 provide a hanging mix of craft and code. It imagines another cartography of Central Asia, with every video within the set up infusing the areas with erased histories and traditions, placing forth another future for them. Whereas the tapestries are created by hand, the movies are a mix 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. Relatively, it’s a part of a deeper reckoning — with historical past, with loss, and with the methods that form how tales are remembered or erased. She engages with AI not as a impartial instrument, 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 underneath 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 method to confront and reanimate these tales.
AI Realism: Qantar 2022 was Menlibayeva’s first undertaking 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 have been violently suppressed by the state and subsequently censored in nationwide media — the undertaking constructs an artificial memoryscape from collective trauma. In the course of the protests, the Kazakh authorities imposed a near-total web blackout, plunging the nation into an info vacuum.
Confronted with this blockade, Menlibayeva started gathering protest-2related tales from buddies and social media, extracting key phrases in Kazakh and Russian, in addition to voice messages despatched through landlines and cellular networks. These fragments of actual speech grew to become 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 recollects. “I used audio recordings of voice messages, phrases these folks 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 situations, the occasions, could be forgotten or intentionally erased,” she says. “On this work, the folks’s phrases are the principle materials. That’s the reason the undertaking 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 typically 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, together with her personal images or video stills — and even embroidered motifs handed down from older generations. These supplies are reworked utilizing Steady 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 best immediate. Then I select probably 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 rejoice AI’s democratizing potential, Menlibayeva stays cautious. “AI is a posh instrument with each democratizing potential and the danger of reinforcing new hierarchies,” she warns, noting that “AI methods are sometimes managed by giant companies, which influences entry and energy.”
So, why use them in any respect? Menlibayeva doesn’t consider AI creates something really new, solely what information makes potential. However by inserting her personal photographs, myths, and archives, she sees it as opening a dialogue between algorithmic methods and human historical past. “AI acts each as a instrument and a distorted mirror, reflecting the hidden codes, preferences, and limitations of its creators: information, tradition, and energy,” she says. “I consciously have interaction with these biases, embedding my private mythologies into the method.”
To Menlibayeva, “humanizing AI” doesn’t imply instructing machines to imitate empathy. As an alternative, it means embedding human tales, reminiscences, and resistance into their logic. In her artwork, AI turns into a method to get better 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 shouldn’t be the duty of programmers, it’s the activity of artists,” she says.
