The Arts, Technology, and Democracy Forum: Mashinka Firunts Hakopian | Ancestral Intelligences: Data Feminisms and Algorithmic Coloniality

Join THE ARTS AT LAFAYETTE for the Arts, Technology, and Democracy Spring 2026 Forum with Mashinka Firunts Hakopian. 
Data Feminisms and Algorithmic Coloniality

Countering dominant imaginaries of artificial intelligence, this talk attends to ancestral intelligences: situated, embodied ways of knowing that are transmitted across diasporic time-spaces, or surfaced from the lacunae of omissive datasets and archives of dispossession. These ways of knowing challenge the disembodied, technoscientific “view from nowhere.” They refuse the algorithmic erasure of non-Western knowledge systems and visual cultures. They ask us to consider: Whose cognitive perspectives and modes of meaning-making do sociotechnical systems inherit? Which histories are presented as technological futures, and whose ways of knowing and sensing vanish from these tableaus of futurity? Turning to face occluded pasts, an attunement to ancestrality works to conjure pluriversal outcomes.

Mashinka Firunts Hakopia is an Armenian writer, artist, and researcher. Hakopian is an Associate Professor in Technology and Social Justice at ArtCenter College of Design and a 2024-25 Visiting Fellow at Cambridge Visual Culture. She holds a PhD in the History of Art from the University of Pennsylvania. Her book, The Institute for Other Intelligences, was released by X Artists' Books in December 2022, edited by Ana Iwataki and Anuradha Vikram. Her current book project, Ancestral Intelligences, attends to the algorithmic erasure of non-Western knowledge systems, languages, and visual cultures, arguing for ancestrality as a method for rerouting sociotechnical systems toward pluriversal outcomes. Hakopian was a 2021 visiting Mellon Professor in the Practice at Occidental College, where she co-curated the exhibition "Encoding Futures: Critical Imaginaries of AI" with Meldia Yesayan at OXY ARTS. An expanded version of the exhibition was staged at the Ford Foundation Gallery in 2023 under the title "What Models Make Worlds." 

She is the guest editor of the spring 2023 special issue of ART PAPERS on artificial intelligence, co-edited with Sarah Higgins. She serves as a Contributing Editor for ART PAPERS, an Advisory Board Member for the International Armenian Literary Alliance and Azad Archives, and was a Contributing Editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books from 2020-21. Her writing and commentary have appeared in AI & Society, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Brooklyn Rail Performance Research Journal, the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, ART PAPERS, Hyperallergic, Georgia Journal, and AI Now Institute’s “New AI Lexicon” series.