Guerilla Wearables | Politics of LLMs

Art Laboratory Berlin is pleased to announce that Helena Nikonole has joined ALB’s residency program. Nikonole is a new media artist, independent curator, researcher, and educator whose work explores the intersection of art and technology. Her fields of interest include bio-semiotics, hacktivism, and Artificial Intelligence, a subject she has been exploring since 2016, developing critical and artistic approaches to this rapidly evolving field.

During her residency Nikonole will focus on two primary projects:

1. Guerrilla Wearables

This project involves the development of political wearables designed to facilitate decentralized communication. By integrating technology into fashion, these tools provide secure, off-grid interactions in environments where internet access is restricted or blocked. The project is particularly valuable in war zones, during protests under authoritarian regimes, and for activists requiring safe and secure communication.

2. Research on Large Language Models (LLMs) and Political Ideologies

Nikonole will continue her ongoing research into the biases present in AI language models as well as text-to-image and text-to-video transformers, and other AI systems built on these technologies. Through artistic experiments, she seeks to uncover and challenge the limitations and underlying mechanisms of these technologies, focusing on how they process, reproduce, and represent political ideologies and inherent biases.

Helena Nikonole is a new media artist, independent curator and educator currently based between Berlin and Istanbul. Her field of interests embraces AI, hacktivism, hybrid art and bio-semiotics. One part of her work is dedicated to utopian scenarios of post-human future while another is focused on dystopian present and critical approach to technology. She presents lectures and workshops in the field of Art & Science and AI & art at different institutions including Paris College of Arts, Mutek Festival (Montreal and Tokyo), Leiden University, IMAL (Brussels) and many others. Her artistic work have been presented internationally by institutions and festivals such as Ars Electronica 2019 and 2022, ZKM Museum (Karlsruhe), CTM Festival (Berlin), Athens Digital Art Festival, Kapelica Gallery (Ljubljana), Chronus Art Center (Shanghai), Drugo More (Rijeka), “YouFab Creative Award 2019 Winners Exhibition”, SHIBUYA QWS (Tokyo), Open Source Body Festival 2022 (Paris), Warsaw Biennial 2022 etc. For more information about Helena Nikonole: https://nikonole.com/.

Art Laboratory Berlin is dedicated to supporting interdisciplinary art projects that engage with contemporary issues at the nexus of art, science, and technology. We look forward to the insights and innovations that will emerge from Helena Nikonole’s residency.