With her thought-provoking AI art, Katarina Petrović challenges sacred cows

Disadvantaged, feminism, racism. These are three of hundreds of words on a White House blacklist. Since President Trump started his second term of office, using these words is actively discouraged. The New York Times even discovered that entire texts have been removed from some Government websites. The newspaper shows that language and power are inextricably linked.

‘Language use lets you create worlds, but at the same time, control them’

How language creates power structures is a recurring theme in the work of Katarina Petrović, the Serbian artist and researcher. She says that “The words we give to certain processes, phenomena or objects determine how you view, observe and research them. Language thus helps you create worlds, but also to control them at the same time.” Her fascinating installations, many based on AI, are exhibited in the TU Delft Library until 27 May.

Reversed meanings

For two exhibited projects, she had culturally significant texts negated by large language models using software that she wrote herself. “Negation is a way to expose prejudices, cultural assumptions and hidden stories in our language use.” Two of the books she negated are Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species and Genesis from the King James’ version of the Bible. “Prejudices and assumptions underlie every text, including the Bible,” says Petrović.

She sometimes uses her work to challenge sacred cows. A couple of days after her exhibition opened, she received an  email from a Christian fundamentalist TU scientists about Negative Bible, the installation in which she expressed negation of the Bible. “The email was polite, but on the nose very much. It basically said that I must not change the word of God,” she says. “But I did not change the Bible’s text in Negative Bible. Instead, it was a new text. Furthermore, if he would have dived more deeply into my work, the TU Delft academic would see that we have something in common. We both believe in the value of words.”

A destructive goddess

In generating the Negative Bible, Petrović experimented with several control vectors. She drew out doubts in the text and the language model was asked to create the opposite of an anthropocentric and paternalistic world view. The text that it produced is, in Petrović’s words, the embodiment of a ‘goddess that is quite destructive and negative and wonders if things really are what they seem’.

The jet black screen at the back of the Library does indeed show quite destructive AI generated texts. One example is And the Goddess dismantled the garden and removed the man from it. It makes you think. What do the Bible texts mean for the narratives that we now tell each other? And what would have happened if it were not Eve, but Adam who took the first bite of the apple?

Outer space poetry
For her Cosmologicus installation, Petrović built an antenna and wrote software herself. The antenna receives radio waves emitted by Jupiter. The software turns the outer space signals into poetry. This created 16,000 poems which she published in 32 books. It is not the antenna but the books that are the main part of the installation. Thirty-one are neatly displayed, and one lies open next to them. On the open page the text reads ‘Eager chocolate due, reasons arm here safety’.

The lines in the poem do not appear to mean much at first sight, but that is not what Petrović is about. For her, the installation is an experiment in which she wants to move outside the boundaries set by scientific language. “The language in much of the hard sciences is based on the idea that you can only talk about the world if something is statistically and objectively correlated with other data and is confirmed in several experiments,” she says. “Scientific language thus limits what you may and may not think.” And this is a pity, she believes, as it means that you can rarely come up with new ideas. Once again, a sacred cow is questioned.

‘My work means that I can be a kind of joker that travels between art and science’

Given her experiments with language and AI which are expressed in installations, Petrović includes herself in the ‘Art Science’ genre.  She believes that this puts her in a unique position. “My work means that I can be a kind of joker that travels between art and science. I question all kinds of practices and in doing so I hold up a mirror to scientists.”

Petrović believes that questioning is badly needed at TU Delft. “The hard sciences in the Netherlands are very much applied sciences. They are targeted at engineers, practice and innovation. I believe that scientists should also think about fundamental scientific questions.” As an example, she asks what the origins of time and space are. “Only by asking yourself questions like this can you force yourself to think about how humans give meaning to the rapidly changing and technologically immersed world around us. The questions not only remind us that science is not only about progress, but it is also about understanding about who we are as humans.”