Disabled Artists Imagining AI — a three-day exhibition & workshop
Three days at Arpana Art Gallery in which disabled artists show their own work and imagine the creative AI tools they'd actually want — on their own terms, including the option of wanting none.
AI tools for creative work are everywhere now, and so is an assumption that runs through most of them: that disabled artists, when they appear in these conversations at all, are users to be accommodated — their needs folded into existing systems after the fact. This exhibition starts from a different premise.
For three days at Arpana Art Gallery, the room holds art on the walls alongside the unfinished, often contradictory process of artists thinking out loud about what they would want, build, or refuse, if anyone had asked them first.
The three days
• 20 June — Opening & sharing session. The exhibition opens to the public; artists spend the afternoon sharing their creative journeys and their relationships to digital tools, before generating images together using Midjourney as a shared reference point for Day 2.
• 21 June — Speculative design workshop. Participants imagine, sketch and prototype the creative AI tools they'd actually want — or the ones they would refuse to build.
• 22 June — Public artist talk & closing. The exhibition continues; participants share the tools, briefs, refusals and lists of demands they generated over the two working days.
Three kinds of work on view
• Finished pieces by the participating artists — work that exists on its own terms, long before any conversation about AI began.
• Process material from Maqaam Foundation's archive — sketches, documentation and records of a creative community whose labour is too often left undocumented.
• Speculative design outputs generated by the participants themselves — proposals, refusals and provocations for what generative AI could be, or should never become.
Gallery
