Alya Alqarni

Alya Alqarni

Alya Alqarni is a research-based artist, examining how emerging technologies shape contemporary cultural narratives and future forms of art.

Her artistic work engages with AI-generated systems, cultural data bias, and questions of representation within technological infrastructures. Her work has been presented at international exhibitions, research platforms, and institutional programs, including Cairotronica, NeurIPS’ Machine Learning for Creativity and Design, Ithra, the G20 Global AI Summit, and Sadu Studio Art Residency in Kuwait. She has also presented and spoken on contemporary museum practice, design, and artificial intelligence at venues including the Saudi National Museum, Ithra, among other.

Alqarni holds an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons School of Design and is currently pursuing an MA in Museum Studies at SOAS, University of London.

Projects
Meme-graph
Performing for no audience
Misidentified: A Garden of Men
Misidentified: Zine
Hybrid perception : A Stereoscopic Synthesis of Analog and Digital Forms

Other
Experiment 1

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Meme-graph:a counter-archive of internet sentiment in wartime.

Interactive Archive / Hyberlink
2026-ongoing

A counter-archive documenting and analyzing internet sentiment on the conflict in the Middle East. Meme-graph investigates memetic warfare as it unravels a web of idiosyncratic correlations. The system arms the user with tools to trace the origins of a meme, how it transforms and mutates, who repackages it, and what happens to its meaning at each node when the institutional archive deliberately fails.

Meme-graph responds to the limitations of institutional archives when confronted with rapidly evolving digital culture. Rather than preserving a stable record, it captures a living network of associations, contradictions, and collective memory. By treating memes as cultural evidence, the project asks how history is produced online, who controls its circulation, and what forms of knowledge emerge when archives become decentralized, participatory, and continuously rewritten.

Performing for no audience
Ceramic sculpture, photogrammetry, 3D printing, performance
2018

Performing for no audience is an experimental research examining the tension between self-perception and the external gaze. Beginning from a personal experience of being observed, categorized, and interpreted
through cultural assumptions, the project investigates how identity changes when it is translated into digital and sculptural forms.

Starting with an experimental performance where the artist turns the metaphor into a physical condition, she is stuck in concrete, and then breaking free. The labour in this act recreates the social conditions in
a literal sense. The artist then, takes that experiment to a gaming enviroment, to allow the users to embody the artist and live through the frustrating position and the great releif after breaking out of that
concrete mold. The final work originated through photogrammetric scans that transformed a physical subject into a three-dimensional model. This digital reconstruction with its limitations and flaws was then materialized as a ceramic sculpture positioned on a concrete pedestal, reducing the complexity of the scanned body into a singular object of display.

By moving between body, scan, object, and simulation, the research explores how technologies of representation produce distance between lived experience and its image. The project considers how identity is continually reconstructed through systems that claim to document reality while simultaneously reshaping it.

Performing For No Audience was created in 2018, and named retrospectively in 2026.

Misidentified: A Garden of Men

Generative art, data bias, computer vision 2019

Misidentified is a practical critique of culturally biased datasets. It raises the question of machine perception of different cultures. These datasets are in analogy the modern archeological record of material culture, of which we perceive—contemporary— societies through. This question was sparked by when ML model, im2text, identified— or misidentified— a full covered woman with her son as: "A man sitting on a curb holding his phone".

In this project, we are testing several images through im2txt to generate rather irrelevant captions to use them as gallery labels with the imagery artifacts. The selection of images is based on assigned factors for the purposes of the Artathon: One, candid culturally relevant images and two, mostly men to highlight the "Shimagh" element for its aestheti

However, one image has stood out in the results and inspired even more experimentation with it. That is the "a bunch of vases that are sitting on a table."; which is in fact a group of Saudi men wearing their traditional red and white Shimagh in an auditorium. We took the image through a minor session in Deep Dream, taking the result and Style Transferring it with a mask of flowers we made in photoshop; their synthesis was taken again through Deep Dream but for multiple sessions to finally create the masterpiece of the image gallery: A Garden of Men.

The images are exhibited as a photo gallery with captions and translation into Arabic. It is designed to gradually reveal the layers of misidentification. The user experience starts with full view of familiar photos and images until he or she reads through the labels and its translation. Only then, the title of the exhibition/project and the witnessed results come into a full circle.

This being said, Misidentified is a pseudoarchaeological project which aspires to afford diverse AI-generated records to encourage and open the conversation about our future archive.

Misidentified:

Identity and Machine Interpretation

Zine, data bias, computer vision
2018

Publication

210 x 297 mm
26 Page Softcover
Staple Bound

Mis-identified is a practical investigation on data-bias and cultural exclustion. The investigation started when the first error happened. As Alya was generating captions to her family album, she noticed the US developed computer vision model was not recognizing objects and people dressed in traditional attier. This incident shifted the dynamic completely. Datasets are the archaeological record of the present, the thing a culture gets read and remembered through. A community absent from that record cannot be identified, therefore cannot be seen. The machine guesses. It guesses wrong. The work runs the error two ways. It shows the captions raw beside photographs of Saudi domestic life. Familiar scenes turn strange. The zine, identity, and machine interpretation, gathers the failures with humor and absurdity.

Hybrid perception: A Stereoscopic Synthesis of Analog and Digital Forms

Custom-built analog and digital cameras, stereoscope,
2018

Operating at the intersection of traditional optics and digital computing, this project utilizes a custom-built hybrid stereoscopic camera to seamlessly merge analog and digital capture methods. By relying on human cognitive perception to synthesize these distinct exposures into a unified 3D reality, the work explores the camera as an active participant in shaping contemporary visual narratives.