The current images of AI reinforce and even amplify existing harmful tropes. There is a lack of images of AI in existing digital databases that reflect the ongoing critical discourse about AI design and development. The Archival Images of AI project explores how existing images – especially those from digital heritage collections – can be remixed and reused to create new images, particularly to represent AI in more contextualized ways.

Commissioned by AIxDESIGN, the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, and Better Images of AI, this collage series is a visual exploration of the fragmented realities of developing AI under extractive conditions. Thinking carefully about overlay and overlap, the practice of remixing imperial archives is a form of visual resistance and refusal– collage becomes a way of moving against the archival grain, embracing the “invisible” histories of oppressed peoples in the development of “new” technologies. 

In the context of AI, collage becomes a modality for exposing the human extraction, labor, and bias that underpin these “complex” systems. The visuals of hands, strings, wires, and computer chips are woven throughout the two related themes of “Textiles & Technology” and “Frontier (Models).”  The use of playful colors contrasts with the fragile foundations of AI infrastructure, rooted in digital colonialism and climate harm. This work positions AI as a system built on labor, material, and capital—revealing the often invisible, cheap, and intense labor across Asia, Africa, and beyond in electronics manufacturing.