Welcome to join us at UmArts Research Studio or online for this #FrAIdaytalk !
Linda Dounia Rebeiz and Delali Vorgbe collaborate as ‘Unpaid Labour’ and will give their Artists FrAIday talk on the opening day of the exhibition Ai and the Paradox of Agency. The artists will introduce their newly commissioned artwork ‘Pangool’ which considers what happens when we treat AI not as a neutral technical system, but as a cultural and proto-spiritual artefact, one capable of holding living cultural knowledge. Pangool is an AI repository system for the Serer cosmology of Senegambia. It proposes AI as an engine for preserving indigenous knowledge systems rather than flattening them, while navigating the tension between the desire to be known by models and the right to control how one is understood. In this talk, artists Linda Dounia Rebeiz and Delali Vorgbe unpack the practical challenges of building training archives from scratch: gathering oral data through fieldwork, negotiating access to protected knowledge, patching fragmented datasets, and challenging taxonomies that flatten indigenous worldviews into Western categories.