Artists

Nora Al-Badri

Nora al-Badri, Babylonian Vision, 2020, Videostills
(c) Nora Al-Badri

With Babylonian Vision (2020), the multidisciplinary
and conceptual media artist Nora Al-Badri opens up new perspectives on our perception of cultural heritage. The work is built on 10,000 digital images - mostly of objects such as figurines, jewelry, or pottery - that the artist selected from the largest collections of Mesopotamian, Neo-Sumerian, and
Assyrian cultures housed in major museums in the
Western world. Al-Badri used these images to train
a neural network, through which new images are
generated. This technology learns the regularities or patterns of input data and then manipulates, mixes, and remixes them to create new visualizations.
The resulting images appear, as a result of the generation process, as synthetic objects, offering faded traces of the past. Through these digital artifacts, the artist brings together speculative archaeology with machine learning-based museum practices by generating techno heritage - the preservation of cultural heritage through digitization. With the algorithmic representation of the objects, the artist not only questions the role of digitization in museum practices but also the concept of authenticity and the institutional power structures of Western museums. What role can technology play in the creation of a democratic representation of culture, how do objects become carriers of social and cultural memory of the past, and how do we decide when their interpretation becomes definitive?
In her practice, Al-Badri often challenges the power of supremacy of international administrative and curatorial museum structures. In 2017, she developed the work NefertitiBot together with artist Jan Nikolai Nelles. The bot can be placed in museums as an installation alongside ancient arti-facts and is able to make material objects from other cultures in museums of the Global North speak for themselves. Like Babylonian Vision, the bot deconstructs the fiction inherent in institutional narratives and challenges the politics of representation.

Text: Sarie Nijboer

With Babylonian Vision (2020), the multidisciplinary
and conceptual media artist Nora Al-Badri opens up new perspectives on our perception of cultural heritage. The work is built on 10,000 digital images - mostly of objects such as figurines, jewelry, or pottery - that the artist selected from the largest collections of Mesopotamian, Neo-Sumerian, and
Assyrian cultures housed in major museums in the
Western world. Al-Badri used these images to train
a neural network, through which new images are
generated. This technology learns the regularities or patterns of input data and then manipulates, mixes, and remixes them to create new visualizations.
The resulting images appear, as a result of the generation process, as synthetic objects, offering faded traces of the past. Through these digital artifacts, the artist brings together speculative archaeology with machine learning-based museum practices by generating techno heritage - the preservation of cultural heritage through digitization. With the algorithmic representation of the objects, the artist not only questions the role of digitization in museum practices but also the concept of authenticity and the institutional power structures of Western museums. What role can technology play in the creation of a democratic representation of culture, how do objects become carriers of social and cultural memory of the past, and how do we decide when their interpretation becomes definitive?
In her practice, Al-Badri often challenges the power of supremacy of international administrative and curatorial museum structures. In 2017, she developed the work NefertitiBot together with artist Jan Nikolai Nelles. The bot can be placed in museums as an installation alongside ancient arti-facts and is able to make material objects from other cultures in museums of the Global North speak for themselves. Like Babylonian Vision, the bot deconstructs the fiction inherent in institutional narratives and challenges the politics of representation.

Text: Sarie Nijboer

Nora al-Badri, Babylonian Vision, 2020, Videostills
(c) Nora Al-Badri