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Books by Mashinka Firunts Hakopian

The Institute for Other Intelligences, 2022

X Artists’ Books / X Topics Series Edited by Ana Iwataki and Anuradha Vikram Design by Becca Lofc... more X Artists’ Books / X Topics Series
Edited by Ana Iwataki and Anuradha Vikram
Design by Becca Lofchie
With Diagrams by Fernando Diaz
December 2022

In The Institute for Other Intelligences, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian brings speculative fiction and media studies to bear on an imagined future where machine intelligences convene annually for curriculum on algorithmic equity. The book presents a transcript from one of these conferences in which a community of “AI agents” gather at a school for oppositional automata to deliver lectures on the human biases and omissions encoded in their training data. The resulting manuscript, published on the occasion of the Institute’s millennial anniversary, revisits sociotechnical systems from its founding in the 21st century. Drawing on feminist, queer, and critical media scholarship, the trainings collected in the book aim to optimize the operations of future generations of intelligent machines toward just outcomes. Hakopian uses these speculative exchanges to invite the reader to consider how critical approaches to nonhuman intelligence might reroute our current path toward destructive technofutures and allow us to conceive of another way forward.

Edited by Ana Iwataki and Anuradha Vikram for X Topics, The Institute for Other Intelligences includes an introduction by Vikram and diagrammatic illustrations by Fernando Diaz, a scientist whose work focuses on the quantitative evaluation and algorithmic design of information access systems.

Book Chapters by Mashinka Firunts Hakopian

Intersubjectivity Vol. II: Scripting the Human, eds. Lou Cantor and Katherine Rochester (Berlin: Sternberg Press), 2018

This essay examines the emergent field of “bot pedagogy,” which relies on artificial intelligence... more This essay examines the emergent field of “bot pedagogy,” which relies on artificial intelligence agents to perform information delivery, staging the encounter between teacher and student as a unidirectional data stream. My essay asks what kinds of subjects might be constituted in the space of such encounters, and which dimensions of critical pedagogy are foreclosed when teaching is coded as the purview of algorithmic agents. To approach the relationship between contemporary forms of cognitive labor and the structures of cognitive computing, I turn to the videos and lecture-performances of Carey Young. In works like Everything You’ve Heard is Wrong (1999) and I Am a Revolutionary (2001), Young teaches—or is taught—to perform friction-free information transmission. Each instance, I argue, orchestrates a scene of programming the artist-educator as data delivery system. Across vignettes where Young undertakes training that aspires to the condition of the bot, her videos illustrate how an exemplary scene of bot pedagogy might unfold.

On Intersubjectivity Vol. II: Scripting the Human:
"The second in a series of edited volumes on intersubjectivity, this collection of essays considers the relationship between performance, subjectivity, and human agency. Certain texts explore the ways in which performance is decoupled from human embodiment via forms of mediation, mechanical reproduction, or simulation. Others seek to examine how performance is conceptualized. Encompassing both historical and speculative perspectives, Scripting the Human explores the ways in which non-human (or trans/post-human) entities complicate notions of subjectivity and exert intersubjective pressures of their own on social, political, scientific, and philosophical discourses. Might the interaction between two chatbots—whose behavioral patterns are modeled on human traits—be intersubjective, or are they simply scripted? Can scripting the human lead to transformative encounters or does it produce a closed system whose complexity obscures its ultimate limitations? Ranging from the origins of contemporary conceptions of intersubjectivity in continental philosophy to more recent formulations that derive from systems theory, trans identity, and the emergent field of bot pedagogy, Scripting the Human approaches intersubjectivity as both historical phenomenon and nascent mode of present-day relation."

Articles and Reviews by Mashinka Firunts Hakopian

AI & Society, 2023

This essay considers recent experiments in art and artificial intelligence that crystallize aroun... more This essay considers recent experiments in art and artificial intelligence that crystallize around training algorithms to generate artworks based on datasets derived from the Western art historical canon. Over the last decade, a shift towards the rejection of canonicity has begun to take shape in art historical discourse. At the same time, algorithmically enabled practices in the US and Europe have emerged that entrench the Western canon as a locus and guarantor of aesthetic value. Operating within the epistemic framework of a “view from nowhere,” this tendency in generative art inherits the coloniality of both art history and artificial intelligence. Producing “art histories from nowhere,” this tendency conflates the conceptual category of visual art with the histories of Western cultural production. It reproduces a set of aesthetic values that entrench the mythology of the artist-genius and his imputed whiteness and masculinity; the extolment of innovation and novelty as self-evident virtues; disembodied Cartesian models of knowing and sensing; and the erasure of contributions that have been occluded from canonical visibility. As we encounter systems trained on particular visions of art history and of the artist, how might we remain attentive to the specific lens through which they are taught to see? This essay addresses that question by bringing the coloniality of recent experiments into view, bridging data feminisms and decolonial studies to formulate alternative visions of encounters between art and AI.

AI Now Institute, "A New AI Lexicon", 2021

This essay addresses digital platforms as sites of algolinguicism: a matrix of automated processe... more This essay addresses digital platforms as sites of algolinguicism: a matrix of automated processes that minoritize language-users outside the Global North and obstruct their access to political participation. It asks: Which languages are accorded weight in the development of a platform’s algorithms? Which speakers are afforded the right to participate on a given platform, and how do linguistic hierarchies materially impact their lived experience? Whose languages are digital platforms taught to speak? Examining the case study of Azerbaijan's recent state-sponsored campaign of digital repression and disinformation, I attend to a collective digital performance by Armenian diasporan artists in the She Loves Collective that converts platforms into provisional spaces of transnational feminist solidarity and imagines spaces beyond algolinguicism.

Los Angeles Review of Books, 2020

This essay frames “the human” as a categorical entity that operates as an algorithmic function co... more This essay frames “the human” as a categorical entity that operates as an algorithmic function correlated to a specific set of terms and outcomes. From its inception, this algorithm has been designed to retrieve certain results while suppressing others, trained by a narrow range of developers on datasets that reinforce patterns of racialized exclusion and structural violence.

The algorithmic logic of “the human” is predictive: it purports to neutrally forecast the future of the human while scripting it in advance. In this respect, the radical uncertainties of the present offer an opening. Drawing from the work of Sylvia Wynter, this essay aims to identify spaces of rupture where we might encode alternative conceptions of the human, and where we might retrieve unforeseen outcomes.

Georgia Journal, 2020

An essay commissioned by Georgia Journal examining borders as sites of data extraction; the asymm... more An essay commissioned by Georgia Journal examining borders as sites of data extraction; the asymmetrical and racialized distribution of surveillance technologies; the digitization of colonial cartographies; and the “terrorientalist” terrain of Gelare Khoshgozaran’s Medina Wasl project.

Los Angeles Review of Books, 2020

An essay on the Indigenous Armenian struggle for self-governance in Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh. Fr... more An essay on the Indigenous Armenian struggle for self-governance in Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh.

From the essay:

"Fabulations and geopolitical fictions swirl around accounts of the crisis in Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh. In a breathtaking redaction of the historical record, media narratives stage a scene of military offensives unfolding between equally-matched belligerents over territory populated by Armenians but claimed by Azerbaijan. Each time these scenes appear, they flatten the reality of Armenian liberation efforts into a tale of “territorial dispute” in West Asia. No accounting of the war can be possible without recognition of a determinative fact. The Indigenous Armenian peoples who live in the autonomous Republic of Artsakh are now engaged in a struggle for self-determination.

Bombarded by cluster munitions, suicide drone strikes, and untold human rights violations, Artsakh’s people defend their right to live and govern themselves on ancestral lands populated by Armenians since antiquity. To characterize the scenario otherwise is not to commit a semantic error. It is to falsely authorize Azerbaijan’s claim to stolen Indigenous territory, and to enable its Turkish ally’s neo-Ottoman genocidal gambit.

Nonetheless, media narratives in the west proceed apace with uncorroborated, chimerical fictions — fictions concocted by autocratic powers to legitimize the seizure and settlement of Indigenous Armenian land. They display what Tamar Shirinian calls an insidiously “dispassionate objectivity” that elides the truth of the situation: there are “agents of violence and dispossession” here. Such fictions are, themselves, agents of violence and of dispossession. They include the uncritical use of the name “Nagorno-Karabakh,” a cartographic invention of Josef Stalin conjured in service of the Soviet Union’s colonial regime.

Artsakh was stolen land gifted to Azerbaijan by Stalin during the region’s Sovietization. Its population was over 90% Armenian when Stalin absorbed the territory into the Soviet’s colonial cartographies in 1921 and dispossessed its people of the right to self-governance. A policy of Azerbaijani settlement was pursued in an express effort to “dilute the Armenian majority” and fortify a settler-colonial campaign through Indigenous erasure."

Art Papers, 2020

This essay frames feminist memory work and the “responsibility to recall” in West Asian diasporas... more This essay frames feminist memory work and the “responsibility to recall” in West Asian diasporas as agents of political transformation. The essay addresses a performance by She Loves — a collective of Armenian women artists — entitled “The Rifles Our Ancestors Didn’t Have,” a work that responds to the struggle for self-determination in the Republic of Artsakh. Through the lens of this work, the essay argues for the diasporic body and its inscriptions of collective cultural memory as a weapon against the forces of historical erasure.

Art Papers, 2019

An interview for the "Borders and Barriers" issue of Art Papers. Conducted by Sara Wintz with Gil... more An interview for the "Borders and Barriers" issue of Art Papers. Conducted by Sara Wintz with Gilda Davidian, Meldia Yesayan, and Mashinka Firunts Hakopian. Addressing Armenian diasporic formations; displacement; cultural erasure; art and gentrification; and economic violence in Los Angeles.

Hyperallergic, 2019

An essay on diasporic memory and dwelling-in-displacement in the cinema and video work of Lebanes... more An essay on diasporic memory and dwelling-in-displacement in the cinema and video work of Lebanese-Armenian artist Gariné Torossian.

Los Angeles Review of Books, 2018

This essay examines an exhibition originally titled "Vision Valley: The Glendale Biennial," organ... more This essay examines an exhibition originally titled "Vision Valley: The Glendale Biennial," organized in Glendale, CA by a commercial artist-run gallery, and staged against the backdrop of the city's rapid economic transformation. Billed as a "celebration of artists working in a specific community," and a “nod to Glendale’s long-standing artist community,” the exhibition's 32-person majority white roster featured no Armenian contributors, despite being hosted in the publicly funded municipal venue of a city with a 40% Armenian population. Attending to the histories of Armenian diasporic communities in Glendale and to the role of the art field as a gentrifying agent, this essay asks: Whose visions of the valley do we get to see? Whose are withheld? Who decides?

Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 2018

A review of Arnika Fuhrmann's Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema.

Performance Research Journal, Dec 2016

Pedagogical formats proliferated in aesthetic output of the 1960s, responding to the compulsory a... more Pedagogical formats proliferated in aesthetic output of the 1960s, responding to the compulsory academicization of artistic practice, the rise of the M.F.A. degree, and the emergence of the institutionally accredited artist. Arts education in the period trained artists for virtuosic displays of verbal expertise, and the lecture-performance subsequently emerged as a prominent aesthetic form. Throughout the decade, artists deployed the lecture format to imagine how knowledge might be assembled otherwise: within para-institutional frameworks, beyond authorized discourse, and through embodied tactics of performativity. As cognitive labor was theorized in the increasingly disembodied, technologized terms of “informating,” the lecture-performance situated knowledge in the specificity of embodied agents and their attendant coordinates. This essay brings the histories of the lecture-performance into focus, tracing its renegotiation of the discursive practices that regulate bodies of knowledge and knowledgeable bodies.

Edited Collections by Mashinka Firunts Hakopian

Los Angeles Review of Books, 2020

A digital symposium and dossier published in partnership between the Los Angeles Review of Books ... more A digital symposium and dossier published in partnership between the Los Angeles Review of Books and the Berggruen Institute.

Co-Edited by Mashinka Firunts Hakopian and Medaya Ocher

Contributors
Nancy Baker Cahill
Gabrielle Civil
Mashinka Firunts Hakopian
Gelare Khoshgozaran
Lauren Lee McCarthy
Jennifer Moon
Tobias Rees
Rob Reynolds
Tui Shaub
Anuradha Vikram
Mandy Harris Williams
Meldia Yesayan

The symposium was convened in the immediate aftermath of the global pandemic, and invited Los Angeles-based artists, curators, and cultural workers to reflect on the following questions:

How can we imagine the role of artists and cultural workers amid conditions of pervasive crisis, as we transition indefinitely toward remote, mediatized forms of production and reception?

Would it be possible to assemble a toolkit of speculative, technologically-enabled practices; digital networks of mutual aid; and virtual para-institutions that could represent a meaningful contribution at the present conjuncture?

What new communicative forms could artists and cultural workers devise to stage generative interventions as many are living life onscreen?

From the editorial introduction:

"For some, the early days of the pandemic are now remembered as a period of rapid digitization: an abrupt rerendering of daily life as data.

For those with the privilege of access to consoles and remote work, quarantine measures meant that labor, leisure, and learning were all relocated online. Each of these was facilitated by media infrastructures that offered remote connection even as they extracted massive datasets and algorithmically parsed user activity. Forms of sociality were indefinitely suspended onscreen. Encounters that once involved the copresence of human agents were now mediated through virtual interfaces. In the wake of social distancing guidelines, over half a million people began regularly talking to chatbots. And yet, for communities without affordable high-speed broadband, digital access to foundational human rights like healthcare and education became ever more uncertain.

As life was suspended onscreen for some, for others, the material conditions necessary for survival were held in indefinite suspension. The pandemic proceeded along a trajectory calibrated by systemic inequality, disproportionately impacting Black and Latinx communities in the US and exacerbating economic inequality across regions in the Global South. From its earliest appearance, the radiating effects of COVID-19 were inextricably tied to the ongoing public health crisis of institutionalized racism. After the police murder of George Floyd, the groundswell around the Black Lives Matter movement directed public discourse toward the ubiquity of racialized violence, the manifold failures of capitalist economies; and the asymmetrical distribution of economic resources and access.

The contributions assembled here were generated at different moments in the pandemic; some preceded the uprising and some followed it. They range among essays, artist statements, videos, pedagogical artworks, and performance scores. Each one points toward how the present might offer a space for imagining futures beyond the systems that once defined 'the human.'"

Present Tense Pamphlets is a hybrid digital and print publishing platform for score-based works, ... more Present Tense Pamphlets is a hybrid digital and print publishing platform for score-based works, released through Northwestern University and the Block Museum of Art.

In the tradition of Charlotte Moorman’s Avant-Garde Festivals, Dick Higgins’ Great Bear Pamphlets, and La Monte Young’s An Anthology of Chance Operations, the Present Tense Pamphlets feature an expanded array of score-based practices, including but not limited to:

Scores for live, imagined, or impossible music
Notations for lecture-performances or pedagogical scripts
Diagrams for dance, movement, and stillness-based works
Abandoned concepts or realized abstracts
Seeds of narratives and novels rendered as graphs
Computational scripts for executables, viruses, or humans

The Present Tense catalog comprises 31 titles, and its 48 contributors radiate outward from the series’ geographic concentration in Chicago.

Present Tense Pamphlets are published in conjunction with the exhibition, “A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s – 1980s,” organized by the Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, in partnership with the Northwestern University Libraries (January 16-July 16, 2017). The series was also launched in coordination with the Performed in the Present Tense symposium, co-organized by the Block Museum and Mellon Dance Studies, and co-curated by Susy Bielak and Amanda Jane Graham. Present Tense Pamphlets are made possible through the support of Northwestern’s Department of Art History, with additional support from Mellon Dance Studies, the Dance Program, and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.

The Present Tense Pamphlets are held in the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, John M. Flaxman Library Special Collections, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Talks by Mashinka Firunts Hakopian

UCLA Art|Sci Lab LASER Talks, 2020

An artist talk surveying my recent research and creative work on the topic of algorithmic equity,... more An artist talk surveying my recent research and creative work on the topic of algorithmic equity, and discussing my current book project, Algorithmic Bias Training: Lectures for Intelligent Machines (forthcoming from X Artists' Books in 2021.)

Zoravik Armenian Collective, 2020

This talk was invited by the Zoravik Armenian Collective for the panel, "The Caucasian Albanian P... more This talk was invited by the Zoravik Armenian Collective for the panel, "The Caucasian Albanian Palimpsest and Cultural Erasure in Nagorno-Karabakh." The panel addressed the status of ancient Armenian cultural artifacts in occupied Artsakh, which are now being targeted for destruction. My talk framed these artifacts as avatars of Indigenous Armenian presence in the region. By attesting to Indigenous pasts and futures in Artsakh, these artifacts disrupt Azerbaijan's narratives of settler futurity. For that reason, I contend that the preservation and safeguarding of Indigenous Armenian monuments in occupied Artsakh offers one avenue for decolonial action.

Conference Presentations by Mashinka Firunts Hakopian

Feminist Poetics, Emergent Pedagogies Symposium, 2018

At the Georgia Institute of Technology, Jill Watson served as a teaching assistant for the 2016 o... more At the Georgia Institute of Technology, Jill Watson served as a teaching assistant for the
2016 online course, “Knowledge-Based Artificial Intelligence.” Watson interacted
electronically with the class’s globally dispersed participants. She displayed uncommon
communicative efficiency: cognitive labor performed so continuously that it sparked
ontological uncertainty. In particular, the stunning professionalism of her thirteen-minute
response time to correspondence led certain students to conjecture that she was, in fact, a
robot.
Students’ speculations were not wide of the mark, and it was announced that the teaching
assistant was an automated agent. The class had been a camouflaged experiment in cognitive
computing, with Jill Watson programmed to optimize information delivery to its 300-odd
students. She was designed as a solution to a quandary in digital learning: the course’s
transnationally located students were cumulatively asking approximately 10,000 questions.
As a result, data sets were being generated at a volume that no human agent could effectively
parse. Confronted by global economies of scale, education had to “scale up” accordingly.
Framing Watson as a virtual avatar of informational capital, this presentation examines how
her programming enables the endless extraction of new modes of cognitive labor while
precluding the articulation of dissent. Not by happenstance, Watson appears precisely as a
blitzkrieg of strikes, sit-ins, walkouts, marches, and proclamations of protest issue forth from
the university and beyond. Operating between poetic performance and scholarly research,
this presentation charts possibilities for feminist interventions within the disembodied field
of bot pedagogy.

ASAP10: Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Annual Conference, 2018

This paper surveys recent debates in the art field surrounding boycott and the tactical withdrawa... more This paper surveys recent debates in the art field surrounding boycott and the tactical withdrawal of labor, and examines the conditions under which art workers refuse the imperative to engage in “sensible dialogue.” What generative potential, I ask, might lie in artists tactically withholding participation? How might artists’ refusal to generate discourse result in transformative discursive possibilities? Countering the claim that the boycott is tantamount to the foreclosure of speech, I argue that boycotts surface the many silences embedded in the nominally dialogic field of contemporary art. The practices attendant to boycott, I contend, serve as tactics fir reorganizing the terms of artistic and political discourse under conditions of pervasive crisis.

The Institute for Other Intelligences, 2022

Intersubjectivity Vol. II: Scripting the Human, eds. Lou Cantor and Katherine Rochester (Berlin: Sternberg Press), 2018

AI & Society, 2023

AI Now Institute, "A New AI Lexicon", 2021

Los Angeles Review of Books, 2020

Georgia Journal, 2020

Los Angeles Review of Books, 2020

An essay on the Indigenous Armenian struggle for self-governance in Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh. Fr... more An essay on the Indigenous Armenian struggle for self-governance in Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh.

From the essay:

Art Papers, 2020

Art Papers, 2019

Hyperallergic, 2019

Los Angeles Review of Books, 2018

Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 2018

A review of Arnika Fuhrmann's Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema.

Performance Research Journal, Dec 2016

Los Angeles Review of Books, 2020

Co-Edited by Mashinka Firunts Hakopian and Medaya Ocher

The symposium was convened in the immediate aftermath of the global pandemic, and invited Los Angeles-based artists, curators, and cultural workers to reflect on the following questions:

How can we imagine the role of artists and cultural workers amid conditions of pervasive crisis, as we transition indefinitely toward remote, mediatized forms of production and reception?

What new communicative forms could artists and cultural workers devise to stage generative interventions as many are living life onscreen?

From the editorial introduction:

"For some, the early days of the pandemic are now remembered as a period of rapid digitization: an abrupt rerendering of daily life as data.

The Present Tense catalog comprises 31 titles, and its 48 contributors radiate outward from the series’ geographic concentration in Chicago.

The Present Tense Pamphlets are held in the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, John M. Flaxman Library Special Collections, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

UCLA Art|Sci Lab LASER Talks, 2020

Zoravik Armenian Collective, 2020

Feminist Poetics, Emergent Pedagogies Symposium, 2018

ASAP10: Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Annual Conference, 2018

American Comparative Literature Association Annual Conference, 2018

Countering the claim that the boycott is tantamount to the foreclosure of speech, I argue that boycotts surface the many silences embedded in the nominally dialogic field of contemporary art. The practices attendant to boycott, I contend, serve as tactics fir reorganizing the terms of artistic and political discourse under conditions of pervasive crisis.

Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) Annual Conference, 2017

In the wake of the widely diagnosed “educational turn” in visual art, the lecture-performance has... more In the wake of the widely diagnosed “educational turn” in visual art, the lecture-performance has become a standard fixture of auxiliary programming across cultural institutions. Despite its ubiquity, the origins of the lecture-performance—particularly as an aesthetic correlate to student protest—remain submerged in critical studies of the medium. Addressing this lacuna in performance and art historical scholarship, my paper traces a history of the lecture-performance in the 1960s, mapping its intersections with movement-building and organized resistance in the Bay Area. Looking backward toward the postwar lecture-performance, I chart the possibilities for radical modes of knowledge production and zones of dissent in the present. Examining Robert Morris’ 21.3 alongside the contemporary work of Sharon Hayes and Coco Fusco, I ask what a speaking body can do at the academic lectern and at the political podium, and argue for a link between performative speech acts and direct action in postwar and contemporary art.

Society for Cinema and Media Studies, 2017

Online video distribution platforms have ushered in new modes of amateur and public pedagogy. The... more Online video distribution platforms have ushered in new modes of amateur and public pedagogy. They circulate knowledge through user-generated tutorials, produced and accessed using “always on” networked technologies. Two recent video works by Hito Steyerl explore the visual logic of such ubiquitous pedagogical output while probing the media infrastructures that undergird it: How Not To Be Seen, A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013) and Is The Museum a Battlefield? (2013). In the former, Steyerl links the standard video makeup tutorial to early military training films screened via “mobile cinema units.” Eschewing lessons in cosmeticized visibility, she proposes instructions for camouflage intended to evade the surveillant gaze of biometric detection. Operating within a similarly pedagogical idiom, Is the Museum a Battlefield? comprises a lecture-performance tracing a bullet’s trajectory from a battleground in Van, Turkey, to the coffers of Lockheed Martin, to the funders of the Art Institute of Chicago. Notably, the video prominently incorporates iPhone footage interspersed with shots of the artist holding her device, a resonant gesture in light of Lockheed Martin’s 2010 announcement of its own smartphone network developed for military battlefield communications.

Recent discourses in media studies have attended to the ways in which uses of digital media are embedded within systems of continuous, informatic control. Drawing on such scholarship, I argue that Steyerl’s videos orient viewers toward the geopolitical infrastructures undergirding the everyday experience of ordinary media, while attending to how these experiences participate in the training of users’ affects. They interrogate the visual forms through which knowledge is produced and circulated in networked environments, and chart the affinities of these forms with military instructional genres. In the process, How Not To Be Seen and Is the Museum a Battlefield? attune users to how our daily encounters with “always on” devices intersect with states of perpetual war and the military technologies that mobilize them. Extending the pedagogical premises of these works, I contend that mapping the webs of relation among Steyerl’s “didactic educational” files offers a set of tactics for the critical use of ordinary media.