Episode Six: Power

Do we have the power to refuse mass surveillance? In our final episode, we speak with Forensic Architecture founder Eyal Weizman, who explains how artists, activists, and researchers can use the tools of photography, surveillance, and AI to hold corporations, governments, and other institutions accountable.

What is the environmental impact of AI on our planet, and what colonial impulses does this technology enable? Episode Five zooms out and up with leading AI researcher Kate Crawford, technology writer Arthur Holland Michel, and photographer Richard Misrach to look at how cameras are used to divide, extract, survey, and surveil landscapes.

In Episode Four, we talk about the algorithmic potential of storytelling. Artists Stephanie Dinkins and Stan Douglas discuss how they use the language of photography, surveillance, and AI to narrate different pasts and imagine different futures. Dinkins draws upon her own life experience, while Douglas incorporates moments from British history.

If we know that it is impossible for a photograph to be objective, then why do we rely so heavily on photography as evidence? In Episode Three, we speak with artists Lynn Hershman Leeson and American Artist to consider how AI can complicate our relationship to pictures we would otherwise think of as visual “proof.”

Episode Two explores the benefits and disadvantages of going unseen by surveillance technologies. We examine notions of visibility and invisibility in the context of AI imaging systems with author and professor Simone Browne, artist Sondra Perry, and artist and academic Mimi Onuoha.

Photography has been used as a tool to record our bodies from the creation of the first mugshots in the late 19th century to recent developments in facial recognition technology. In the first episode of Mirror with a Memory, artist Zach Blas and filmmaker and scholar Manthia Diawara will discuss what it means to leave it to machines to verify our identities.

The Mirror with a Memory podcast focuses on different facets of the conversation around artificial intelligence and photography—from biometrics and racial bias to the ways that we perceive the environment and international borders. Hosted by renowned American artist Martine Syms, the six-episode series features leading artists and thinkers in dialogue accompanied by excerpts from important artworks, unpacking the ways in which the collision of photography, surveillance, and artificial intelligence impacts everyone.