A Garden of Men — 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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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.