Through to Thriving: Connecting Art and Policy with Mimi Ọnụọha

Audio of this conversation is available via your favorite podcast service.

Welcome back to another episode of Through to Thriving, a series of podcasts about how to build futures beyond this moment. For this episode, I spoke with visual artist Mimi Ọnụọha about connecting art with how we think about governing technology.

Ọnụọha describes her work as exploring “how we build systems that make sense of and organize the world and how doing that relies on exclusion of different people or places or experiences.” During the conversation, we talked about the changing trends in nomenclature of data and artificial intelligence, the role of art in bearing witness to authoritarianism, the interventions and projects that she's created about the datafication of society, and how artists and policy practitioners should work more closely together.

Ọnụọha explained the nature and goal of her art:

My work really looks at the myths that make that kind of selective progress feel really natural or inevitable. But I do that through installations and through films and through very embodied sensorial experiences that are meant to be evocative. They're meant to touch your spirit, and also your mind.

She described the work of artists within today’s society:

The work that artists do is we take the world and we filter it through the lens of our own experiences, and some of that is the self-expression part, but I think much deeper than that, artists bear witness. That's our job. Our job is to face reality without flinching and to help others see it. And I think about that really pulling from the ideas of folks, like I said, like Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, even Rick Rubin.

She also explained the historical connection between art and policy:

I'm really inspired by ‘50s, ‘60s, post-colonial nations that were creating their own nations, that were figuring out what it meant to be independent after having shaken off the colonial powers that were overseeing them. And what you see in those spaces– I think about Nigeria for instance, because I'm Nigerian– is that a lot of the people who ended up thinking deeply about government and policy were artists. They switched. You know, it's like in these moments of huge change and turmoil, you actually need people who have a way of thinking differently about the world, and you need to shake things up a little bit.

Ọnụọha also shared her thoughts about the large scale datafication of our world:

Right now it feels like we are just awash in data, but actually it's a process. To datafy the world is a process, and it is a collection process, and there are tools. It's an intentional process. And it also is one that doesn't just unfold, easily or rotely. There are complicating factors, and those are interesting. Those are useful for us to know. It is important for us to know that we cannot put everything in the world into the form of data.

She spoke about the current connection between policy practitioners and artists:

I think we need to recognize ourselves as different parts of the same body. You know, the arm does something different than the leg, but you need both. You use both when you walk. And I think that if we know that, maybe it can inform our interaction together so that it isn't reductive or simplistic. Or we can understand that we use different languages. We might be speaking to different audiences, but we are sharing a similar message.

Ọnụọha also explained how the relationship between artists and policy practitioners should work in the future:

I think that our hopes and our critiques should be intertwined. Artwork isn't going to come up with the language for the Section 230 reform debates. I just don't think it's gonna be an artist who's hammering out bans on facial recognition or calls for algorithmic accountability or data transparency, but we do need those things. That's policy work. That is deep and important work. We need people who can articulate that, who can stake that ground and fight that fight.

A full transcript is forthcoming.