Flusserstudies.net

Absent Intelligence

Nouf Aljowaysir

This paper investigates how contemporary AI systems reproduce and amplify colonial hierarchies of knowledge. Through practice-led artistic research, Nouf Aljowaysir traces how the historical and digital visual record of the Arab world, largely produced by imperial actors, has been absorbed into AI training data, shaping both archival memory and algorithmic interpretation. In response, she developed Salaf (Ancestors), which uses AI segmentation techniques to remove orientalist figures from the Ken and Jenny Jacobson Orientalist Photography Collection at the Getty Museum, producing what she describes as an absent dataset. Drawing on Vilém Flusser's apparatus theory, the work argues that intelligence is defined by what has been narrowly recorded, digitized, and made legible online. By centering oral storytelling traditions and creating absent datasets, Aljowaysir's practice reveals how non-Western knowledge systems remain systematically marginalized within computational infrastructures that present themselves as universal.