When I began searching for visual traces of my family genealogical journey in digital archives, one of the first collections I came across was Gertrude Bell’s. She is a renowned British explorer who traveled extensively across the Middle East alongside Lawrence of Arabia, documenting the region through photographs. I decided to run her images through an object detection model, curious to see how the AI would interpret them. The results, however, were odd and revealing. For example, this image tagged a Bedouin figure as a “Samurai.” Many other images were tagged with militaristic terms, reflecting how machine learning models—trained on contemporary media language—tend to associate Arab regions with conflict. The AI models also frequently applied Western cultural labels or generalized photos into south asian categories, revealing a Western-centric worldview that flattens cultural nuance and misunderstands regional identities.

Nouf Aljowaysir is an award winning new media artist based in Brooklyn. She splits her time between the art and tech world to study how technologies are designed and their consequential impacts on society and culture. Her artistic research and work specifically focuses on our changing relationship with algorithms. She poses intimate questions to tools of "intelligence", using the exchange to reflect not only on herself but also on how these systems shape our ways of seeing and thinking.

Nouf has been awarded residencies at ThoughtWorks Arts and Somerset House. Her work has been exhibited internationally at galleries and festivals such as the Centre Pompidou, M+ Museum, CPH:DOX, and the Tribeca Film Festival, among others.

Her film Ana Min Wein? (Where Am I From?) won the 2023 Lumen Prize for Moving Image and was released by The New York Times Op-Docs series in June 2024.

Nouf’s latest piece, Salaf (Ancestors), is currently featured in the group exhibition The World through AI at Jeu de Paume.