Paper short abstract:

I would like to offer a glimpse into my ethnographic research at the C4AI in São Paulo using an arts-based approach. By interpreting the AI development through the lens of the metaphor of antropófago , a decolonial socio-technical imagination of "anthropophagic AI" is envisioned.

Paper long abstract:

In my presentation, I would like to offer a glimpse into my ethnographic research at the Center for Artificial Intelligence (C4AI) in São Paulo, Brazil. While both the site and my research are embedded in what Crawford describes as "registry of power" in an unjust world, my aim is to enable an alternative reading of the findings of anthropological research through an arts-based approach. Arts-based research as a paradigm within the spectrum of post-qualitative research (Busch & Franco 2022) may serve as a way of creating and fostering decolonial knowledge (Leavy 2018). In my anthropological research, which is partly based on laboratory ethnography (Latour & Woolgar 1979), I try to interpret the findings using the metaphor of antropófago. The anthropophagic movement was initiated in 1928 by Tarsila do Amaral's painting Abaporu, which in Tupi means 'the man who eats people', and Oswald de Andrade's Manifesto Antropófago (1928). As a metaphor for cultural appropriation, anthropophagy is closely related to concepts such as "hybridity" or “creolization”, but with a certain “Brazilian” specificity (Dunn 2010).

Reading and reinterpreting the C4AI's efforts to create an AI "from the South, for the South" through the lens of "anthropophagic incorporation" allows to envision a distinctly decolonial socio-technical imagination of “anthropophagic artificial intelligence” (Cantarini 2023). For me, the route to this new imagination begins with the oil colours of Amaral's painting and leads through the alienation and appropriation of cultural elements, to the provisional end of an AI whose futuristic potentials cannibalise themselves in a neo-colonial world.