Misidentified: Zine — 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:

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.