Linda Dounia – Spannungsbogen
Hours and dates
- From Oct 27 to Oct 30 from 10:00 to 18:00
The place
Delta
Language
All
AboutLinda Dounia
Linda Dounia is a self-taught artist, designer, and curator from Senegal who explores the social construction of power and the cultural implications of how it is distributed. Linda is particularly curious about the relationship between individuals and the systems that govern them, and seeks to shed light on the ways in which hegemonic power structures affect her agency over her identity, physical embodiment, and environment.
Linda’s practice is rooted in technology while showing a deep respect for the tangible. Her practice plays with the borders that exist between a variety of digital and physical mediums and incorporates collaborations with AI and machine learning. She has a background in visual and interaction design.
In an approach that is both radical and poetic, Linda’s work seeks to bring herself out of a state of numbness and surrender to the patriarchal modus vivendi, and to create space for the quietly brewing resistances within her.
KIKK in townSpannungsbogen
Linda Dounia’s long-form AI project, Spannungsbogen, reflects on issues of discrimination in commercial AI technology and the lack of representation of non western perspectives and data in generative adversarial network (GAN) generated art.
For this series, the artist hand painted 2,000 acrylic vignettes in an abstract style inspired the Fremen of Frank Herbert’s Dune. She then trained a GAN model with these paintings to output 10,000 new paintings that were then arranged following an indexing system that considers form, colour, and texture. Finally, Linda curated these outputs to feed into the creation of 80 animations of 1 minute each and 400 still images.
In Herbert’s words, spannungsbogen is ‘the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing’. This series simulates a conversation between artist and machine, a dialectical search for meaning between a thinking mind and a feeling one, and an ode to the invisible creatures in the cracks and crevasses of the world, patiently lying in wait for their turn to freely exist.
Spannungsbogen was exhibited by Quantum Art online and in its physical space in Los Angeles. The entire series sold out in under 30 minutes on the day it was auctioned.
