Linda Dounia

Artist and designer Linda Dounia is pioneering the movement to liberate AI. Sure, artificial intelligence is autonomous. But humans still create it, so it's steeped in prejudice, bias and imperfections. "People from the Global South, especially people of colour, using AI today can confidently attest that it doesn't know them and that its conceptualisation of their reality is fragmentary," explains Rebeiz. Through her vastly varied, energetic and ethereal artwork, Rebeiz quite literally re-writes AI from the inside out. She has an archival approach to her work, collecting information from her own life, history and culture in Senegal, which becomes data to input into GANs and algorithms which generate her work. Dounia paints too and uses images of her paintings as data sets for new algorithms. Through this process, Dounia steadily trains AI out of its current whitewashed condition. 

Before becoming a full-time artist, Dounia was a digital designer for nearly ten years. In the industry she found herself moulding her creativity into Western ideas of ‘modern’ design. So, as she developed her art practice, she reconnected with her inner voice. Much of this came back to her childhood growing up in a creative household. At the time, she resented the “visual noise" for being "non-modern," but now she sees it as an integral part of her story. The work of contemporary artist Julie Merhutu has also had a big influence on Dounia, along with Abstract Expressionist Alma Thomas and many of her artist peers from the Web3 community. The results of these sprawling influences are sublime. Not only is Dounia’s practice philosophically, politically and technologically fascinating, but it's visually breathtaking, too. On her own terms, Dounia is mastering a hypnotic, bewitching form of abstract AI resistance.