‘Cyprus as AI Saw it: Reinventing the Colonial Gaze’ is part of ‘Cyprus as AI Saw it’, a wider artistic project thematic concerned with decolonial re-interpretations of the island’s history. The endeavour employs an AttnGAN text-to-image generation model and a RNN text generator. The latter is trained on text from colonial handbooks of Cyprus, originally published when Cyprus was still part of the British Empire and reflecting an overly orientalist gaze of the (then) newly annexed British colony. Cyprus is presented therein as a degenerate country whose people are in urgent need of salvation. Trained on such a corpus, the model may then generate new colonial descriptions of Cyprus. These then become the input of a GAN-driven text-to-image pipeline. This subsystem relies on a bespoke dataset that is meant to reflect the local reality since, not surprisingly, the readily available image databases largely fail to account for Eastern Mediterranean landscapes/culture (they generally produce images that are more reminiscent of the Western cities that host the big tech companies that distribute them).

The resulting AI hybrid is then left iterate, generating original colonial views of Cyprus upon demand. The output text and imagery are used in a number of related artistic outputs, exhibitions, events and artefacts. Employing a variety of physical, digital and hybrid media, audiences are encouraged to interact with the system, producing unique (and often individualised) (de-)colonial views of Cyprus. In this fashion, the project re-examines the historical relationship between coloniser and colonised, touches affairs of (digital) colonialism, and brings forth an alternative (de-)colonial narrative as a tactic to regain agency from a local perspective.

a ‘Cyprus as AI Saw it: Reinventing the Colonial Gaze’ installation comprises an exposition of printed matter, reprints of some of the original books used to trained the AI system, a hardcover ‘Cyprus as AI Saw it: Reinventing the Colonial Gaze’ book with AI-generated imagery/text, info on how to install the smartphone applications, and printed matter audience may take along with them as mementos.

The Cyprus as AI Saw it: Reinventing the Colonial Gaze book comprises AI-generated text and imagery. The model is trained upon 19th century corpora, so that the book interrogates how the dominant colonial views of Cyprus resonate contemporary AI-driven techno-scientific culture to produce contemporary (de-)colonial narratives. The book comprises 57 A5-sized pages inside a hardcover case. The pages can be shuffled in arbitrary fashions so that audiences may intuitively explore the material and the different kinds of (de-)colonial narratives it may set out.

Having surveyed a ‘Cyprus as AI Saw it: Reinventing the Colonial Gaze’ art installation, audiences are encouraged to take a few pieces of (de-)colonial text or image with them as mementos. Craft envelopes, spare photos and text printouts are available so that each individual may assemble in situ their own tiny (de-)colonial narrative.