What happens when a historical painting leaves the museum and enters an artificial neural network supposedly modeled on the human brain? As generative AI becomes ever more powerful and learns from the history of our accumulated experiences and memories, how will the narratives we tell transform? With an interdisciplinary approach spanning contemporary art, film, and meticulous research, Singapore-based Ho Rui An continues to question the relationship between image and power in this truly compelling, must-see lecture performance.

Taking inspiration from a personal encounter at the Google Cultural Institute, Ho suggests a future where meaning and context are lost because of the way that current machine learning models process any kind of image as mere patterns of noise. By retelling the histories of Cold War-era state planning, decolonization, and the dawn of the Internet, he also reveals the intersecting systems of power behind the ongoing generative AI boom.

There are two screens on stage, one projecting real-world archival and found images, while the other generates eerie images in real time—showing a human-centered historical narrative and AI’s machinic (mis)recognition in parallel to each other. At stake here is not only the future of representation, but also the ethics of “intelligence” as we allow machines to think on our behalf.