‘Cyprus as AI Saw it: Reinventing the Colonial Gaze’, is an artistic project by Alexia Achilleos and Marinos Koutsomichalis, is part of ‘Cyprus as AI Saw it’, a wider artistic project thematic concerned with decolonial re-interpretations of the island’s history. A hybrid AI system that is trained with text from colonial handbooks of Cyprus, originally published when Cyprus was still part of the British Empire, as well as with a custom image dataset meant to reflect this colonial view of the island. This AI hybrid is then left to iterate, generating colonial views of Cyprus upon demand. The resulting text and imagery are used in a number of related artistic outputs, exhibitions, events and artefacts. This app displays such generated texts and imagery.
By tapping on the screen, users can generate different AI-generated colonial gazes of Cyprus. In this fashion, the project re-examines the historical relationship between coloniser and colonised, and generates an alternative colonial narrative, as a tactic of regaining agency from a local point of view.