While I was researching and generally being overwhelmed by the reality AI holds for us all, I had the serene pleasure of reacquainting myself with the work of Ruth Asawa.
Just as I was seeing how AI is making our world flat through its large learning models, labelling and sorting things and people out of their complexity, I was reminded of the infinite mutability of Asawa’s vision.[1] A vision where repetition and folding made form from formless materials, like paper, wire, or clay — but materials which contain limitless possibility. In Asawa’s hands, the humble supplies she chose were transformed into intricate shapes full of the life she experienced daily.
I spent some time watching art videos recently, learning more about the artists who were working with AI and I came across the short film series How to See by Museum of Modern Art, which are a collection of 58 videos that ‘take you deeper into the stories of modern art,’ as MOMA’s YouTube channel says.[2] One that caught my eye was on Ruth Asawa. I knew this artist from my time in the Bay Area, but I had forgotten that I knew her, so I watched this short film with intrigue. I recognised her work immediately, but more importantly, learning more about Asawa and her remarkable vision was exactly the antidote I needed in that moment of AI apprehension.
Another short film in the series was really the point of my engagement — AI Art: How artists are using and confronting machine learning | How To See Like A Machine.[3] This film describes how artists, Refik Anadol, Kate Crawford, and Trevor Paglen are investigating AI, and the approaches they are exploring through their arts based research. Paglen, an artist I have admired for a long time, and Crawford, who is an artist and the author of Atlas of AI, are looking at the inherent cultural and political systems that are built into AI through the bias that exists in the learning models, and are trying to unpack the deeper implications of these prejudicial traces within AI systems. While Anadol has made a data set from the MoMA collection and through his work, Unsupervised, is allowing AI unsupervised learning where it “dreams” and speculates its own machine imagination without using the usual labelling for learning. He says, ‘For Unsupervised we took the entire metadata of MoMA archives, which is around 138,000 images’ creating bespoke software that would interpret this data into a real-time presentation of the AI speculations, or its dreams.[4] Anadol continues:
Once AI starts to create this new reality, we learned that there is not any borders between these biased categories that we need as humans to understand things. That is a truly multi-dimensional imagination. It is blending past, now, and future. It is blending multiple materials. It’s just a convergence of things that we thought they are independent.[5]
This is a beautiful research finding; to think that we could learn from AI how to overcome and relinquish bias, categorisation, and the limiting labels that keep us bound to fear and separation. However, Kate Crawford reminds us of how absurd it is to invest emotional trust in these systems. She says:
It still strikes me as preposterous that we’re assuming that a single image can be given a label, a single word when we know about the multiplicity and complexity of a single image, the idea that we can so benignly label something as a chair and then a person as say a debtor or a kleptomaniac. These are things that are literally happening today in data sets. And the risk there is that we’re starting to see a very simplified, and in some ways, just really bleached version of the world.[6]
Which brings me back to Ruth Asawa. These labelling practices Crawford described for teaching AI are exactly the kinds of simplistic and reductive descriptions that are at the heart of racial, gender, sexual, political, able-bodied, age, and cultural prejudices in our world that persist in othering those we see as different to ourselves. Asawa was subjected to this reductivism and prejudice as a Japanese American coming of age in the 40s. In her sensitively written article for the New York Times Style Magazine, Thessaly La Force tells us about Asawa’s life and work. [7] Asawa was in a Japanese internment camp as a teenager in the United States during WWII. Paradoxically, being interned allowed Asawa time to devote to her creativity and brought her into close contact with Disney animators who became her artistic mentors.[8] She was released early on condition that she enrol in education, and after three years of study for a teaching certificate, she was denied graduation.[9] There was a belief that no one would hire her because she was Japanese.[10] Even her marriage to an American was illegal in many states in 1949.[11] Despite the reductive labels of prejudice, she created some of the most beguiling modernist art of the postwar era in America and called many of its most prominent artists and thinkers her friends.[12] La Force writes about experiencing Asawa’s work:
In a culture of acknowledging those who were previously overlooked, when artists and their earliest champions are finally getting their dues, there is a satisfaction in witnessing the record be corrected. Yet a purely revisionist approach ignores the ways in which Asawa’s art is still remarkably contemporary, how it is a clear articulation of midcentury art’s engagement with spatial abstraction. I have stood in a gallery hung with Asawa’s wire sculptures, where the movement of my own body has caused them to sway, the shadows of the woven wire dancing against the floor. For a moment, I was quietly transported elsewhere — to the deep sea, to a forest or maybe to someplace altogether unearthly.[13]
Being reminded of Asawa’s art while feeling mixed emotions about the changes and challenges that AI is bringing to our human civilisations has put into relief the importance of complexity. We may feel frightened, frustrated, and overwhelmed by elaborate convolutions at times, but we must remember that without complication and diversity we are faced with what Crawford called a “bleached version of the world,” with no colour, no character, no mystery and intrigue. Contemplating the disruption AI poses to our understanding of the world and our place in it, I am reassured by artists like Asawa, who embraced intricacy, the repetition that creates it, and the permutations that result bringing forth new forms. I’m reminded that AI too is a further involution with infinite possibility.
What worries me are those who want to stick a label on it and give it a whitewash.
[2] Museum of Modern Art, (n.d.). MoMA documentaries: how to see. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfYVzk0sNiGFaqN1iYF-KaVKBEgA3ZPCl [Accessed 5 Apr 2026].
[3] Museum of Modern Art, (n.d.). AI art: How artists are using and confronting machine learning | How to see like a machine. Available at: https://youtu.be/G2XdZIC3AM8?si=FljVj4jFwJYUc64B [Accessed 5 Apr 2026].
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] La Force, T., 2020. The Japanese-American sculptor who, despite persecution, made her mark. [online] The New York Times Style Magazine, 20 July. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/20/t-magazine/ruth-asawa.html [Accessed: 6 Apr 2026].
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Museum of Modern Art, (n.d.). Ruth Asawa: documentary on an artist who worked every minute | how to see. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOZC9X97-fQ [Accessed: 5 Apr 2026].
[13] Ibid, footnote 7.
