Mashinka Hakopian is a 2025–2027 VLC Fellow whose fellowship project, Ancestral Intelligences, is part of the Vera List Center’s Focus Theme cycle Matter of Intelligence.

Ancestral Intelligences traces a constellation of interventions into dominant imaginaries of artificial intelligence. As the legacies and logics of colonial violence structure current data practices, they reinforce the algorithmic erasure of non-Western knowledge systems, languages, and visual cultures. To articulate a refusal of these models of “innovation,” this project turns to ancestral memory as a site of reclamation and speculative worldmaking rooted in feminist, diasporic, and non-Western ways of knowing. Rejecting the “view from nowhere” that characterizes Western technoscience, Firunts Hakopian’s research and book project argue for ancestrality as an approach that turns toward occluded pasts to attune us to pluriversal futures.

Mashinka Hakopian, PhD (b. Yerevan, Armenia) is an artist, researcher, and Associate Professor at ArtCenter College of Design. She is a 2024–25 Visiting Research Fellow at Cambridge University and a 2024 Eyebeam Fellow. She is the author of The Institute for Other Intelligences (X Artists’ Books 2022), an artist book and work of speculative feminist media theory that presents lectures on data justice delivered by “artificial killjoys.” Her recent multidisciplinary collaborative artwork, Բաժակ Նայող (One Who Looks at the Cup), explores community dataset creation and has been presented at REDCAT, Music Center LA, and the Asian Art Biennial in Taiwan. With Meldia Yesayan, she is the co-curator of What Models Make Worlds: Critical Imaginaries of AI at Ford Foundation Gallery (2023) and Encoding Futures at OXY ARTS (2021). Her research attends to ancestral intelligences: feminist interventions in computational media rooted in ancestral, non-Western knowledge systems.