Ancestral AI: shifting knowledge paradigms

 

 

What do ancestral forms of divination such as idafa, cartomancy, runes, i-Ching oracle have in common with today’s mathematical and statistical models in AI? They are all knowledge and decision making paradigms, past and present systems for interpretations of patterns. In some way they are Foucauldian technologies of “the self”, a means to understand the world and ourselves in it.

This project ponders upon the language of AI and how it produces knowledge and shapes the world, being developed through a very anglo-saxon language structures of western cultures.

Seeing how that kind of AI is embedding all the historically problematic ways of seeing and doing (colonialism, race and gender issues, human centric acts etc ) is now shifting the knowledge paradigm by producing new knowledge out of it all

I started thinking of countering knowledge forms, taping into past in order to speculate for the future.

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AI shifting knowledge paradigm is a journey into the series of collective critical reflections on power we give to the guiding principles behind dominant knowledge forms / AI paradigm.

 

Through collective discussion, ideation and visualization I aim to create a deck of cards inspired by ancestral knowledge (i-Ching, tarot, non human inteligence).

Participants engage in a collaborative ideation process in order to make a first in line collective draft for a deck of cards (to be developed later on) that can serve as a technology of self-reflection. We speculate on present and future situation we need to reflect on in order to unlearn the known and re-imagine new ways of understanding ourselves and the world around us.

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I seek to draft "technologies of the self" inspired by that core value of other forms of knowledge, weave them together in a new light. So I propose to think on parallels of current AI and Esoteric knowledge. Try engaging in those less spoken languages used in technology such as body and plant.

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The deck of cards in the making is designed to be used collectively to explore unsought alternatives and futures.