DERBY.- In QUAD Galleries, How We Make Meaning links two solo exhibitions by artists Memo Akten and Mimi Ọnụọha. The exhibitions explore aspects and meanings of Artificial Intelligence including; the gathering and use of data, machine learning also how humans and machines input and interpret data to view the world in scientific, spiritual and deeply personal ways.

How We Make Meaning incorporates Deep Meditations: A brief history of almost everything in 60 minutes by Memo Akten and Us, Aggregated 3.0 by Mimi Ọnụọha.

Deep Meditations: A brief history of almost everything in 60 minutes by Memo Akten (QUAD Gallery 1) is a monument that celebrates life, nature, the universe and our subjective experience of it. The work invites us on a spiritual journey through the slow, meditative, continuously evolving images and sounds, told through the imagination of a deep artificial neural network.




Us, Aggregated 3.0 by Mimi Ọnụọha (QUAD Gallery 2) combines 3 artworks using Google’s reverse-image search algorithms, to hint at questions of power, community and identity. The works include: The Future Is Here! which examines the process of dataset creation, teasing out the myths and reality of the labour behind machine learning, which is often done in the poorest parts of the world.

In Absentia 2.0 is based on an event in the early 1900s, when sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois was asked by the US government to conduct research on black rural life in Alabama, research that was never published. Ọnụọha asks “How many find their work halted not by lack of data, but by an unwillingness to hear?” “What is our responsibility both to listen and advocate for racial justice?”

A People’s Guide to AI opens up conversation around demystifying Artificial Intelligence. Visitors can download a free digital copy of the book via a QR code in the Gallery.

In QUAD Extra Gallery Spaces, Tom K Kemp’s Napoleon Complex combines a tabletop roleplaying game, improvised filmmaking and an animated CGI Emperor Moth to narrate the large and small scale consequences of weather modelling algorithms and global catastrophe insurance.