creative resistance to anglocentric a.i.

2018-2024
collaborative artistic research project

Creative Resistance to Anglocentric A.I. is an artistic research project that empowered artists working with emerging artificial intelligence systems, specifically in languages and contexts other than English. Initiated in 2018 in the Netherlands, the project first engaged with artists and authors working in Dutch and German. From 2021-24, a focus on Spanish natural language processing (NLP) supported the collaborative work of several Latin American artists working creatively with A.I. generated text in poetic, narrative, and sonic forms.

Through a series of active workshops led by Rice in the Netherlands, participants focused on collecting text, and  building relationships with their data. Then, using tools to retrain language models like GPT2, participants were ultimately able to generate new texts to provoke ideas in their artwork, their writing, their poetry. However, leading these workshops in the Netherlands highlighted the problem that GPT2 is a very English language model, one of the biases that permeates A.I.

Acknowledging this, the project began to focus on non-English A.I. and assisting German and Dutch artists train very specific models in their own language. We worked with Vanessa Amoah Opoku to create a hybrid model of Jewish-German and Afro-German poetry. And together with Arita Baaijens we developed a Dutch language model that speaks from the perspective of the North Sea.

Vanessa Amoah Opoku, Nichts als Solide, 2021, 4k Video Projection, Sound, 16:25 min

"The spatial installation Nichts als Solide – consisting of two videoworks Nichts als Solide and Haltung – can be understood as an examination of those traces that people leave behind in their surroundings and that burn themselves into landscapes and places. In conversation with poem by the Jewish lyricist Mascha Kaléko and the Afro-German poet May Ayim, which provide a data set for an Artificial Intelligence, a monologue is created in which a new, fictitious lyrical persona is formed." - from vanessaopoku.com
Arita Baaijens, In Gesprek met de Noordzee, 2025, 192 pages, ISBN 9789045048857

"In conversation with the North Sea, the debate about our relationship with nature breaks open and takes you into an unknown world in which language flows, shrimps solve philosophical problems, and the sea comes very close." -  from aritabaaijens.nl

In 2022, the project was reconfigured at the University of Washington through a directed research group (DRG). In this iteration, three Latin American artists addressed the challenge of collecting Spanish language datasets that could be used to train new NLP models. Early on, we recognized that many existing datasets actually reflect the voice, tone, and vocabulary of European Spanish – for example, one existing language model was trained exclusively on texts from the National Library of Spain. Thus, the DRG centered its artistic research around the potential to not only avoid Anglocentric A.I., but to also decolonize A.I. by collecting particularly Latin American textual datasets of fiction, journalism, history, and poetry. This discourse went even further to assert that there is no “standard” Latin American Spanish, and that the nuances of regional language should ideally be reflected in multiple new, hyperlocal NLP models. Ultimately, the project supported the development of works by Esteban Agosin Otero (Chile), Laura Luna Castillo (Mexico), and Nicolás Kisic Aguirre (Peru), as well as the re-staging/exhibition of work by Nicolás Varchausky (Argentina).

participant exhibitions

Esteban Agosin Otero
La Oreja

IN-SONORA
Madrid, Spain


Laura Luna Castillo
La Casa de la 11

Centro Multimedia del Centro Nacional de las Artes
Mexico City, Mexico


Nicolás Kisic Aguirre
Dispositivo de Realidad Mutada

ISEA 
Paris, France

Currents
Santa Fe, USA


Nicolás Varchausky
Archivo P.A.I.S. (35 years)

DXARTS Gallery
Seattle, USA

CASo Centro de Arte Sonoro
Buenos Aires, Argentina


Vanessa Amoah Opoku
Nichts als Solide

Synnika Space
Frankfurt, Germany


Arita Baaijens
In Gesprek met de Noordzee

Atlas Contact Press
Amsterdam, Netherlands

support

FIBER Festival  - 2018 through 2021

St. Joost Akademie voor Kunst en Vormgeving Ecology Futures Masters Program

Mellon Faculty Fellowship - Meany Center for the Performing Arts

Seattle City Artists Grant - Seattle Office of Arts & Culture

Centro Multimedia del Centro Nacional de las Artes

Made possible by DXARTS - The University of Washington Department of Digital Arts & Experimental Media

workshops & presentations

TerraFiction Lab: WorldBuilding
FIBER x WAAG FutureLab
2018
Amsterdam, NL

Cartographies of the Vanishing Now: New Narratives for Earth
FIBER
2019
Amsterdam, NL

Ecology Futures Lab
Creative AI Workshop
2020
Den Bosch, NL

FIBER: ReAssemble Lab
Creative AI Workshop
2021
Online/Amsterdam, NL

Creative Resistance to Anglocentric A.I.
Mellon Faculty Fellows Research Presentation
2022
Seattle, USA

Creative Resistance to Anglocentric A.I.
Research Presentation
El Centro De La Raza
2024
Seattle, USA

press

Schubert, C. (2023) University of Washington professors on using ChatGPT in the classroom. GeekWire, 8 Apr. 2023

Davis, M. (2023) Interview with Tivon Rice. ChatGPT has Infiltrated the Art World. All Things Considered, KUOW public radio

Davis, M. (2023) Interview with Tivon Rice. Artists vs. AI: where innovation meets unwelcome imitation. Soundside, KUOW public radio