Ancestral Intelligences

Computational media has come to be deployed as the avatar of a future that flashes into view from the vantage of a disembodied, universalized observer. Algorithmic visual cultures represent an exemplary site of this future, shaped by generative adversarial networks that inherit Western ways of seeing and reinforce computational coloniality. This article examines a constellation of practices that refuse dominant modes of algorithmic visuality, assembled under the rubric of “ancestral intelligences.” Ancestral intelligences foreground knowledge systems and technologies that may be transgenerationally transmitted, occluded by the epistemic erasures of colonial violence, surfaced from the lacunae of omissive datasets and archives of dispossession, or received from human and nonhuman elders. Attending to projects by artists and activists Nora Al-Badri and Morehshin Allahyari, I frame their critical algorithmic image-making as models of ancestral worlding, approaching ancestrality as a decolonial feminist method for multiplying pluriversal futures in relation to computational media.