Global South Award Winner 2021

IGÚN - Minne Atairu - (United States)

Artwork Description

Showing latent space interpolation of Generative Adversarial Network (GANs) trained with objects looted from Benin Kingdom in 1897. The dataset consists solely of looted bronze works found in various Museum collections. Each latent interpolation is a variation of Igún trained with ceremonial heads from various hereditary craft guilds (see video captions). While Igún is primarily focused on exploring the bronze casting tradition, it was necessary to extend datasets with objects from other hereditary craft guilds. This is because the number of looted bronze objects in museum collections is not adequate to train a GANs model. Of the 3000+ looted objects, about 700 objects are ceremonial heads, and of this 700, a good number of non-figurative objects. Thus, it was necessary to borrow images from the woodcarving and pottery guild. Prototype I: Dataset consists of ceremonial heads in bronze and wood. Prototype II: Dataset consists of ceremonial heads in bronze and pottery.

Partners and collaborators

The prototypes were developed in tandem with community members whose understanding of Benin philosophy has been invaluable in shaping computational logic from a Benin perspective.