Noam Segal

Talking Galleries: “Artificial Intelligence - A Conversation,” 2024

A conversation between humanoid robot Bina48, artist Stephanie Dinkins, and curator Noam Segal on artificial intelligence and its profound effects on image making. From its embrace as a method and a tool to the complex questions that follow; how has our understanding of value, identity, portraiture and more, changed?

Bina48, Android, LifeNaut Project
Stephanie Dinkins, artist
Bruce Duncan, Director, Terasem Movement Foundation

Moderated by Noam Segal, LG Electronics Associate Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

The Algorithmic State: AI as Metaphor, with Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Steven Henry Madoff and Noam Segal, School of Visual Arts, New York, 2023.

If AI is a simulation of human thinking, then can we understand the way it mimics us as a metaphor for the human and what do such metaphorical mirrors suggest? MA Curatorial Practice presents a panel featuring Noam Segal, LG Electronics Associate Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and philosopher Franco “Bifo” Berardi to discuss with Steven Henry Madoff, chair of the MA Curatorial Practice department, what the ramifications of AI as metaphor are for the future of culture and society.

Natural, human, and digital forms of repair are all based on a process of examination, reflection, feedback, and correction. But unlike human repair, which typically has an ethical dimension as well as a physical one, digital repair is most often driven by the efficiency and acceleration of capital and profit. Corporate algorithms and AIs are routinely written, repaired, and refined not toward a horizon of moral health, but, regardless of social impact, toward the astronomically increasing, divisive, and polarizing accumulation of wealth.

The artist Kader Attia’s notion of repair, both in terms of physical objects and societies, helps us to reconsider damage, dysfunction, and trauma in relation to the ways in which AIs are being deployed now and in the future. After all, AIs have already shown the traumas they can cause. To think of AIs as ethical actors rather than simply capitalist ones, and how digital repair might function with this mandate, is the challenging subject Attia addresses in this talk.

Kader Attia is an award-winning artist and a cultural practitioner. In 2016, he founded La Colonie, a discursive space in Paris. In the same year, Attia was recognized with the Marcel Duchamp Prize, Paris, followed in 2017 by the Prize of the Miró Foundation, Barcelona, and the Yanghyun Art Prize, Seoul. He was the artistic director of the 2022 Berlin Biennial, Still Present . Register for the event here.

Photo by Jennifer Soike.

MA Curatorial Practice presents a talk with Maithu Bu, Payton Croskey and Rebecca Stein on AI security and ways to address socially harmful uses of AI. While AI has been utilized in recent years for various security efforts—like locating landmines at sea—it has also been used for monitoring and tracking down civilian populations. Abuse of power is all the more possible when code is invisible. In this panel, the speakers present their research on AI security, touching on technological borders, bioluminescent landmine locators and cybersecurity economic ties.

Maithu Bui is an artist and gaming designer; Payton Croskey is a visual artist and works on tech justice and designing liberatory tools at Princeton University; and Rebecca Stein is a cultural anthropologist, scholar and educator at Duke University.

Rebecca Stein's presentation is not included in this recording.

MA Curatorial Practice presents a virtual discussion with artist Zach Blas and curator Christiane Paul about the artist’s work and its ramifications for contemporary society under the regime of the digital.

Blas uses research-based and artistic practices to scrutinize the relationship between digital technologies and systems of power and the beliefs that they advance. Critical of today’s big technological corporations and their use and abuse of theological narratives and symbolism, Blas extensively considers the fictions, desires, fantasies, histories and icons increasing in today’s technological language, PR and mediation. Looking into three of his recent works that include representations of digital divine entities, which deal with judgment (processing), prophecy (prediction) and immortality (the data self), Blas points to both the liberatory potentialities and political challenges of the present posed by the deployment of religious signifiers.

Zach Blas is an artist, filmmaker, and writer whose practice spans moving images, computation, theory, performance, and science fiction. Christiane Paul, Adjunct Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Professor of Media Studies at the New School, New York.

Artist and theorist Hito Steyerl presents a lecture, “The Photo Is UNK,” in which she excavates the connection between visual literacy, documentation, and the analytical capabilities of computer vision. Following the lecture, she converses with faculty member Noam Segal about the artist’s recent works, Mission Accomplished (2020) and SocialSim (2020).

Presented by MA Curatorial Practice, School of Visual Arts, New York.

The Algorithmic State: Art in the Expanded Technological Field, with Agnieszka Kurant, Jenna Sutela, and Shumon Basar.

MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts presents artists Agnieszka Kurant and Jenna Sutela, and writer Shumon Basar, to speak with faculty member Noam Segal on rapidly evolving digital-art practices, data harvesting, the expanded field of new social sculpture, new forms of art objects and more.

James Bridle, author of "New Dark Age" and "Ways of Being," discusses the widespread social, cultural, and ecological implications of AI with curator Noam Segal.

Presented by MA Curatorial Practice, School of Visual Arts, New York.

Resistance to Algorithmic Colonization, Berlin Biennale, 2022.

Panel: Noel W Anderson, Maithu Bùi, Tarek El-Ariss. Moderation: Noam Segal.

Keynote held within the framework of the conference The Digital Divide on September 15, 2022 at Stasi Headquarters. Campus for Democracy, Berlin.

In thinking about resistance to ongoing colonial conditions through algorithms, the speakers discuss artistic means of production that are difficult to assimilate into computer vision and the algorithmic gaze. Their strategies span from material approaches to adopting leaks, hacks, and code language that come into play in technological precedents in digital minority cultures.

See more here.

Art Basel Conversations: Extractive Legacies: Decolonial Perspectives — 12th Berlin Biennale, 2022.

Panel: Imani Jacqueline Brown, researcher, activist, and artist, New Orleans; Taloi Havini, interdisciplinary artist, Brisbane; Đỗ Tường Linh, member of the artistic team of the 12th Berlin Biennale, independent curator, art researcher, and writer, Hanoi.

Moderator: Noam Segal, member of the artistic team of the 12th Berlin Biennale, independent curator and researcher, New York.

We have a negative impact on the planet every day, from our overuse of fossil fuels to our constant generation of waste. In the era of the Anthropocene, successive acts of colonialism have erased the memory of our relationships with the non-human. Yet repair is not about returning to a pristine pre-industrial past but remembering. It offers possibilities of healing in a world damaged by hyper-industrialization and profit-maximizing resource extraction. Artists and members of the artistic team of the 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, curated by the artist Kader Attia, reflect on what is at the end of a decolonizing process. How can we conceive and set the practice of a decolonial and ecological life in motion?

Curated in collaboration with the 12th Berlin Biennale, 2022.

Curator Noam Segal presents on In place of a missing place, which featured Israeli artwork drawn from the American University Museum’s permanent collection.

Virtual presentation on the exhibition: March 14, 2022.

Ultra Bodies Ultra Species, a conversation with Agnieszka Kurant, Gea Politi, Noam Segal, Marianna Vecellio, and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev at Castello di Rivoli, Italy, 2021.

On November 3, a panel conversation took place between artist Agnieszka Kurant, the Editor and Director of Flash Art Gea Politi, the Curator of Castello di Rivoli Marianna Vecellio, the museum Director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, and Curator Noam Segal, on the occasion of the inauguration of the exhibition Agnieszka Kurant. Crowd Crystal, hosted by the Museum, and the launch of Flash Art International 336 Fall 2021.

On November 6, 2020, the AURORA Biennial hosted an online conversation with Brooklyn-based composer and artist Marina Rosenfeld and Curator Noam Segal discussing Rosenfeld’s sound installation and performance 'Ssalute', which launched the AURORA Biennial 2020-21 program.

About 'Ssalute':
'Ssalute' is comprised of a drive-through sound installation and performance, occupying the upper floors of Headington Companies' LAZ Parking Garage in downtown Dallas and a large-scale public billboard. Rosenfeld’s new work is oriented around the spectator as a driver or passenger, enclosed in the protective skin of their vehicle.

Each visitor’s entry into the work is met by an invitation of sorts—into publicness and mutual presence—in the form of a personal salute offered by a live trumpet player, a role shared by notable Dallas-based musicians Raquel Samayoa, Chris Doty and Freddie Jones. As drivers ascend the labyrinthine architecture of the carpark, this thickly amplified and augmented salutation follows them, echoing through the structure until they emerge onto the roof and the ambient sound of the city.

'Ssalute' is curated by AURORA Biennial 2020-21 Curator Noam Segal and Associate Curators Tamara Johnson and Trey Burns.

Curators Noam Segal and Raphael Zagury-Orly on Walter Benjamin: Exilic Archives, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2016.

Video Production: Yoav Bezaleli.

Conversation between artist Anri Sala and Curator Noam Segal at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 20 December 2014. In conjunction with the exhibition Anri Sala: No Names, No Title.

Video Production: Yoav Bezaleli.