Amir Baradaran

Amir Baradaran is an Artificial ARtist, visiting scholar and arts-based researcher at Columbia University. He is the founder of iBEGOO, a software democratizing the creation of AI-enabled Augmented Reality experiences. Baradaran is a TEDx speaker and the recipient of awards from the Knight Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts. He is the founder of An[0]ther {AI} in Art, a platform to decolonize the future of AI and art-making. Through this residency, he will examine the dynamic potential of Artificial Intelligence to radically transform the art ecosystem just as it is reshaping our world. The future of art making resides in its capability to become emotionally intelligent and pro-actively responsive. What he calls a “spherical” narrative formation is the ultimate level of responsiveness between the machines, the artists, the artwork, the audience, and the experiential site. Such interplay, his book explores, requires a new way of thinking about art (making), its production and its consumption that is fluid and evergreen. For the many rich opportunities AI offers for creative expression in the art ecosystem, however, he also argues that its use requires us to interrogate the ways in which emergent technologies intensify social inequities, particularly through issues of access and algorithmic biases, both of which typically come at the expense of women, people of color, immigrants, and the poor.