In her stunning artistic and filmmaking work, Saodat Ismailova paints a vivid, multidimensional tableau of the pasts, presents and possible futures of Central Asia. Her intricate visual and sonic layerings of histories, myths, and both inner and outer landscapes serve as sites of knowledge transmission and also as spaces for ‘radical re-remembering’ that, in the words of decolonial thinker Rolando Vázquez, “not [only] safeguard or preserve what is there, but also create alternative worlds.” Traversing a range of topics—including the fabric of dreams, the cyclical nature of time, and silence as a gesture of resistance—this conversation probes how Ismailova’s poetic interweavings of spaces, times and memory could lead to a richer palette of expressions for artificial intelligences.

Learn more: Saodat Ismailova  / Davra Collective  

The quote from Rolando Vázquez is from Field Essays, Q: Meandering in Worlds of Mourning (ed. Sophie Krier, Onomatopee, 2022) 

This season of AI Murmurings is generously sponsored by The Resonance Foundation. Music by Christopher Tignor. Audio engineering by Fabian Reichle.