NO TO AI, YES TO A NON-FASCIST APPARATUS

The video No to AI, Yes to a Non-fascist Apparatus investigates how socially applied AI is not only directly intertwined with unresolved injustices of our current system, but actually enables a transition towards authoritarianism that is present in the technology industry itself, in the politics of various countries and institutions, and in the rise of far-right political movements. AI is a political technology because it offers greater social efficiency through acts of exclusion and segregation, thus amplifying vulnerabilities stemming from long-standing social policies and sharpening social divisions. These kinds of systems serve existing social hierarchies and accelerate different dimensions of necropolitics.

The narrator is Dan McQuillan, who authored the text for the video that features animated 3D scans of actual places of resistance. With the use of photogrammetry, the artist constellates different localities and situated testimonies, aligned by the commonality of their struggle for better social conditions. From 56a Infoshop, a DIY and self-managed social centre in South London, through tensegrity structures used in an Amazon warehouses blockade, to Rozbrat, a centre of independent social and cultural activity in Poznan. These grassroots networks of solidarity are forms of counter power that challenge the processes of extraction and exclusion from a perspective that is fundamentally relational. Read more

Production: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana

In the framework of: konS – Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art

Year of production: 2023