Mimi Onuoha [US]

The availability of huge data-sets, advances in computational power, leaps in fields like artificial intelligence and machine learning, and the subsequent incorporation and leveraging of all these things into social, political and economic systems has placed the categorisation and distribution of our personal data and collective identities under new scrutiny. Mimi Onuoha’s work with missing data sets shines light on the algorithmic violence that is being inflicted on queer, migrant and indigenous minorities who are often excluded and misrepresented by automated decision making systems. As we continue to see the rise of algorithms being used for civic, social, and cultural policy making, it becomes increasingly important to critically reflect on the politics that are shaping our digital infrastructures. Mimi’s multidisciplinary approach is evidence of art’s ongoing role in positing alternative models to these data-driven processes that are taking away our agency to intervene in the world that has been built around us.

Mimi Onuoha is a Brooklyn-based artist and researcher investigating the social results of data collection and computational categorization. Her work uses code, writing, performance, and objects to explore missing data and the ways in which people are abstracted, represented, and classified.Onuoha has been in residence at Eyebeam, Studio XX, the Data & Society Research Institute, Columbia University’s Tow Center, and the Royal College of Art. She has exhibited and presented workshops in festivals internationally, and in 2014 she was selected to be in the inaugural class of Fulbright-National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellows. She was recently a visiting faculty member at Bennington College, and currently is teaching at NYU.

Mimi Onuoha is guest of the International Visitors Program of The New Institute