Community Research
Community experiments with artists interested in playful experimentation, p2p education, consensual tech, and DIY cultural production with AI. Stewarded by Sarah Ciston and Emily Martinez.
Who is this by/for?
We are artists interested in working with texts and AI using our own archives and “small data”. We want to explore ways of practicing care and support through our technological ecosystems. We want to deepen how we bring queer, feminist, and decolonial methodologies into our everyday lives and work. We want to experiment with glitch, error, and infecting the larger AI systems with a plurality of stories as a strategy of resistance. We are curious to learn if/how these approaches can help us find openings, write new narratives, and create spaces that can hold us in ways that these systems were not designed to.
Our Goals
- Making AI more accessible and pleasurable for beginners in a supportive environment.
- Centering historically excluded and misrepresented people and knowledge, respectfully and consensually.
- Developing deeper practice with queer, feminist, and decolonial methodologies.
- Working with language models and generative AI
- Working with “no code” tools that lower barrier to entry and allow us to prototype and test ideas with ease
- Setting up guidelines for preparing datasets that respect the contributors and protect their data sources.
- Making machine learning models from “scratch” and fine-tuning LLMs with our custom datasets
- Creating publications and toolkits
Our Work
🦜 p5.js Critical AI Tutorials, Google Season of Docs, 2024
🐚 Imagining Better Large Language Models, Workshop, Mozilla Fest 2023
🌱 Love Corpora, TBD
About Us
Emily Martinez is a new media artist, 1st generation immigrant/refugee (Cuba > Miami), and a self-taught coder who believes in the tactical misuse of technology. She started Unsupervised Pleasures as part of her ML5.js Fellowship project to document some of her research and experiments with LLMs.
Sarah Ciston is a self-described poet-programmer who loves building community through critical-creative code and bringing Intersectional approaches to AI. They hold a PhD in Media Arts and Practice from USC and were an Artistic Research Resident at AI Anarchies in Berlin.