Artist Talk: Aarati Akkapeddi in conversation with Joanna Zylinska

17 Feb 2023 6-8pm

Overview

To mark the final weekend of the exhibition, Aarati Akkapeddi will give an artist talk into their practice.

Combining code, video, family photographs and archival materials, Akkapeddi's work reflects on notions related to the diasporic identity. Their practice explore and question how photography and algorithmic classification methods shape cultural identities. 

The conversation will be chaired by artist, writer, curator and professor Joanna Zylinska. 

Biography

Aarati Akkapeddi is a first-generation, Telugu-American, interdisciplinary artist, educator, and programmer interested in the poetics and politics of datasets. Their work touches on themes of intergenerational memory, loss, and diaspora. Akkapeddi works with both personal and institutional archives to explore how identities and histories are shaped by different methods of collecting, preserving, and presenting data. They combine code, machine learning and analog techniques (photography, printmaking, & embossing), and often use family photographs and archival images as a source material, creating performative rituals of information extraction.

Joanna Zylinska is an artist, writer, curator, and Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice at King’s College London. She is an author of a number of books, including AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams(Open Humanities Press, 2020) and Nonhuman Photography (MIT Press, 2017). Her art practice involves experimenting with different kinds of image-based media. She is currently researching perception and cognition as boundary zones between human and machine intelligence, while trying to answer the question: 'Does photography have a future?'