Linda Dounia is a self-taught artist, designer, and curator from Senegal who has been exploring the use of AI in her work since before its recent surge in popularity within the art world. Her artistic practice is an exploration of the social construction of power and the cultural implications of its distribution. Her fascination with the relationship between individuals and the governing systems that shape their lives is very apparent as her work aims to illuminate the impact of hegemonic power structures on her autonomy over her identity, physical embodiment, and environment. At the core of her practice, Linda Dounia harnesses the power of technology in the form of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning while also giving reverence to the physical world. She creates a rather interesting dialogue by blurring the lines of distinction between various digital and physical mediums in her work. It is notable to mention that Dounia has over 8 years experience in visual and interaction design which she also infuses into her artistic practice.
Linda Dounia’s practice is distinctly characterized by merging traditional artistic mediums with generative adversarial networks; which is a model for deep learning where one computer creates an image and another evaluates it. In a bid to stretch the potential of AI art and explore its ability to convey meaning with the spontaneity of traditional art-making experience, Dounia has been training AI models using her own abstract paintings.
Over the years, Dounia has gained international recognition for her work and has exhibited all over the world. Her works have been shown at notable events like Art Basel in Miami Beach, Art X Lagos and the Dakar Biennale. She has also curated exhibitions such as “Black*Rare” at NFT marketplace, SuperRare. In response to a work by Alma Thomas, Dounia’s NFT Dust is hard to breathe – an animation of curated outputs of a generative adversarial network model trained using her own abstract paintings – was auctioned on Artsy in 2022. She also published Spannungsbogen in 2022 which is possibly the first large-scale AI drops by an African woman called. At Art Dubai 2022, she launched Cyber Baat which is a platform that seeks to promote African-descended digital artists on the blockchain. She has also given lectures at institutions such as New York University.
