AI Nüshu

UchanSun

Artwork description:

Nüshu (女书), Also called 'Women's Script,' is a unique language created and used exclusively by women in Hunan Province, China, for centuries to communicate Chinese in a world where they were denied formal education. Can AI learn from ancient Chinese women and create their own secret language? 'AI Nüshu,' an interactive art project that merges computational linguistics with the legacy of Nüshu. This project trains AI agents to imitate illiterate women in ancient China to create a new language system, symbolizing the defiance of patriarchal constraints and the emergence of language in a non-Western, feminist context.

This is the first art project to interpret Nüshu from a computational linguistics perspective. Two AI agents simulates how ancient women developed a unique language under the constraints of a patriarchal society. This cultural phenomenon resonates with the emergence of non-human machine language under human authority, both metaphorically and practically. Essentially, we integrate cultural phenomena into an AI system.

Contrary to the predefined rules like Morse code, Markov chains, and fictional constructed languages, AI Nüshu evolves organically from the machine's environmental observations and feedback, mirroring the natural formation of human languages. The meaning of language in vector space gradually emerge into the symbols in the system. As this new language is decipherable and learnable by humans, especially Chinese speakers, it inherently challenges the existing paradigm where humans are the linguistic authorities and machines are the learners.