Mimi Ọnụọha seems to be everywhere
For three months — from August 22 until October 27 — Ọnụọha’s work will appear throughout Columbus.
We will be seeing a lot of visiting artist Mimi Ọnụọha this fall. For three months — from August 22 until October 27 — Ọnụọha’s work will appear throughout Columbus (see map): at the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Columbus Museum of Art, at various sites on The Ohio State University campus and on Orange Barrel Media digital kiosks across the city. This distributed exhibition, titled What Is Missing Is Still There, includes work Ọnụọha has created over the past six years that addresses important lacunae in the data that increasingly saturates our world. Her multimedia artistic practice, which encompasses sculpture, documentary film, video installation and code, finds patterns in those absences and highlights forms of knowing that exceed quantification. “If something is always missing,” she writes, “it means there is a spectre of a different kind of world with different kinds of priorities.”
The sorts of questions raised in and by Ọnụọha’s work seem integral to an understanding of AI, of its limitations as well as of what it enables, with the result that Ọnụọha’s visit seems perfectly timed with the rollout of the AI Fluency initiative recently announced by the university. “Ọnụọha’s work looks to the ways algorithms and automated processes already shape our lives and how we appear to others,” explains History of Art Professor Kris Paulsen, who was instrumental in organizing the artist’s visit. “As states and institutions rush to embrace AI, her works remind us to slow down and consider how these systems are trained and who might be harmed or rendered invisible in the process.”
Among Ọnụọha’s published writings is A People’s Guide to AI, co-written in 2018 with Mother Cyborg (Diana Nucera). The book is a comprehensive beginner's guide to understanding AI and other data-driven technologies. As described on Ọnụọha’s website, it uses a popular education approach to explore and explain AI, with the aim of enabling everyone to think critically about the kinds of futures automated technologies can usher in.
In addition to the What Is Missing Is Still There exhibition, Ọnụọha will engage in a conversation with Professor Simone Browne from the University of Texas at Austin in the Wexner Center’s film/video theatre on October 9. They will discuss her new film, Ground Truths, a docufiction retelling of her development of a machine learning model that predicts locations of mass graves, like the one in her hometown, Sugarland, Texas.
Mimi Ọnụọha was born in Parma, Italy, grew up in Houston, Texas, received her BA in Anthropology from Princeton University and then a Master’s degree from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.
“I use the materials of the information age to make sense of the contradictions inherent within modernity. Globalized, quantified societies require the fluid messiness of people to be made into legible forms of data. Anything that doesn't fit is at risk of being forgotten. My practice starts with these forgotten bits, which are always real, even when they are intangible. Every piece I make is a foray into sites that resist being collected and counted, and for this exact reason, reveal the logics of the systems that they undo.”