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LASER: De-colonizing AI On Thursday, June 1st, I attended a LASER Talks event on "Decolonizing AI". The Leonardo/ISAST LASER Talks program brings together people from various disciplines including art and science to give informal presentations about their work and "encourage contribution to the cultural environment of a region". The talk focused on the western-centric development of AI and the potential for machines to inherit the same imperialism and colonialism present in many fields, even today. Amir Baradaran is an augmented reality (AR)tist that discussed the impact of AI on the ecosystem, and more specifically, the art ecosystem. He cautioned about AI becoming the art or the artist but also encouraged the use of AI to help create and innovate.  The talk I was most intrigued by, however, was by the Armenian writer and artist Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, who discussed the inheritance of historically discriminatory and euro-centric views by artificial intelligence.

 Space and Art The idea of space or extraterrestrial and cosmological elements represents an abstract field that we cannot usually see and must rely on our imaginations to visualize. Art enables our imaginations by supplementing it with models, drawings, and videos that help us realize the scale of the unexplored, and that "the richness of our neighborhood is the exception" (Eames Office). Models dating back to Copernicus' heliocentric model of space remain essential in representing space and its elements. Further, many aspects of space exploration were imagined by artists before they were achieved including the weightlessness of the moon described by Jules Verne in "From the Earth to the Moon" in 1856. Thus, space exploration, which is a topic of large interest in popular culture today, started off largely visionary in nature, fueled by art. Image 1: From the Earth to the Moon The presence of geometric designs and ordered structures in space has been of interes