The intersection of art and artificial intelligence is rapidly redefining creative boundaries, yet few artists navigate this complex terrain with the profound historical and critical insight of Almagul Menlibayeva. This acclaimed photographer and multimedia artist harnesses AI not as a mere technological marvel, but as a potent instrument for unearthing, reconstructing, and reanimating narratives lost to the ravages of censorship, political suppression, and cultural erasure. Her work serves as a compelling exploration of how digital tools can challenge dominant historical accounts and reflect the inherent biases of their creators, offering a unique perspective on the power of technology in preserving human experience.
Menlibayeva’s artistic journey is deeply rooted in the traumatic history of Kazakh nomads, a heritage profoundly disrupted by Soviet-era collectivization and its accompanying technological imposition. Her art provides a powerful counternarrative, transforming AI into a lens through which to examine and resist the forces that seek to control memory and identity. This article delves into Menlibayeva’s innovative approach, exploring how she utilizes AI to reclaim silenced histories and infuse technology with profound human meaning.
ALMAGUL MENLIBAYEVA: A VISIONARY BLEND OF TRADITION AND TECHNOLOGY
Almagul Menlibayeva, born in Kazakhstan and trained within the Soviet art system, brings a unique interdisciplinary perspective to her practice. Her early education in folk textiles and Russian futurism laid the foundation for her distinctive layered and hybrid works. For decades, her primary mediums were photography and multichannel video installations, through which she consistently explored themes of historical erasure, cultural survival, and ecological trauma in Central Asia. She critically examines the enduring impacts of Soviet rule, from environmental degradation to the suppression of Indigenous and nomadic histories.
Since 2022, Menlibayeva has significantly expanded her artistic lexicon to incorporate artificial intelligence. This pivotal evolution marks a new chapter in her long-standing engagement with these critical themes. For Menlibayeva, AI is not a neutral instrument but a terrain fraught with power dynamics and ideological underpinnings. She sees it as a means to directly confront and reanimate the stories that empire and state-sanctioned narratives have deliberately overwritten. Her work stands as a testament to the artist’s role in challenging technological determinism and embedding human narratives into algorithmic processes.
THE ARTIST’S ROOTS AND INFLUENCES
Menlibayeva’s background is crucial to understanding her artistic motivations. Growing up in a post-Soviet state with a rich nomadic heritage, she witnessed firsthand the profound impact of historical revisionism and cultural suppression. Her focus on folk textiles highlights a connection to ancestral knowledge and traditional craft, which she deftly juxtaposes with cutting-edge digital technologies. This blend creates a powerful dialogue between past and present, tradition and innovation, allowing her to address complex issues of identity, memory, and resistance in a truly unique way.
“POSTHUMAN MATTER: THE MAP OF NOMADIZING REIMAGININGS #3” – WEAVING ALTERNATIVE REALITIES
One of Menlibayeva’s most striking large-scale installations, Posthuman Matter: The Map of Nomadizing Reimaginings #3, exemplifies her innovative fusion of craft and code. Unveiled at the VRHAM! Digital & Immersive Art Biennale in Hamburg, Germany, this work is a part of her ongoing “cyber textiles” series, which reimagines the cartography of Central Asia.
The installation features video screens softly glowing from the floor, looping footage of evocative landscapes such as salt lakes, steppe villages, and decaying nuclear test sites. Suspended above these screens is a meticulously handwoven textile map, crafted by artisans in Kazakhstan. This tapestry depicts 12 significant sites across Kazakhstan and the surrounding region, each corresponding to one of the flickering videos below. The visual synergy between the tangible textile and the ephemeral digital projections creates a multi-sensory experience that bridges different temporal and material dimensions.
A NEW CARTOGRAPHY OF CENTRAL ASIA
In this work, the videos are a compelling blend of documentary footage captured by Menlibayeva and content augmented with artificial intelligence. The AI infusion breathes life into these locations, imbuing them with erased histories and traditions, thereby proposing alternative futures. This process is not merely about generating images; it’s about weaving narratives that incorporate elements often excluded from official records:
- Feminist rituals: Recovering women’s roles and ceremonies.
- Nomadic storytelling traditions: Reinstating the oral histories and migratory wisdom of her ancestors.
- Whispers of endangered languages: Giving voice to linguistic heritages on the brink of extinction.
By blending handcrafted textiles with AI-generated visuals, Menlibayeva creates a dialogue between the artisanal and the algorithmic. The physical map grounds the viewer in a tangible reality, while the dynamic AI videos project imagined histories and potential futures onto that foundation. This approach highlights her belief that AI can serve as a conduit for exploring the human condition, provided it is guided by intentional, critical human input.
“AI REALISM: QANTAR 2022” – SYNTHETIC MEMORYSCAPES OF TRAUMA
Menlibayeva’s first project to incorporate AI, AI Realism: Qantar 2022, stands as a visceral testament to her use of technology for building potent counternarratives. This project was created in direct response to the Bloody January protests in Kazakhstan in 2022, mass demonstrations that were violently suppressed by the state and subsequently subjected to widespread censorship in national media. During this critical period, the Kazakh government imposed a near-total internet blackout, plunging the nation into an information vacuum.
Faced with this intentional blockade of information, Menlibayeva embarked on a unique artistic endeavor. She began collecting protest-related stories from friends and social media, meticulously extracting key phrases in both Kazakh and Russian. Crucially, she also gathered voice messages sent via landlines and mobile networks, capturing raw, unfiltered accounts of the events. These fragments of real speech, imbued with the emotions and urgency of the moment, became the primary raw material for AI Realism: Qantar 2022.
GENERATING IMAGES FROM VOICE AND TEXT
Working with text-to-image and voice-to-image models, primarily through Google Colab, Menlibayeva transformed these crowdsourced stories into a series of haunting, AI-generated images. The resulting artwork, presented as a 24-minute video and a collection of stills, is deliberately nonlinear and emotionally charged. Its fragmented nature mirrors the fractured experience of trauma and the deliberate erasure of these events from collective memory. “I knew that the conditions, the events, would be forgotten or deliberately erased,” Menlibayeva states. “In this work, the people’s words are the main material. That is why the project is called AI Realism.”
The image Search and Seizure. History of Kairat Sultanbek. Kazakh January (2022), part of this series, is a prime example of the work’s unsettling power. It portrays a chaos of bloodied surfaces and fragmented bodies, yet resists straightforward interpretation. There is no clear sequence of events, no obvious heroes or villains, reflecting the disorienting nature of violence and state suppression. Menlibayeva notes, “AI machines have a large limit, but sometimes system errors give rise to interesting results.” In AI Realism: Qantar 2022, these digital glitches serve as powerful metaphors for the ruptures in history itself: the erasures, silences, and distortions enforced by state violence and exacerbated by data-driven platforms.
NAVIGATING THE AI LANDSCAPE: TOOLS, BIAS, AND HUMAN AGENCY
Menlibayeva’s engagement with AI is both sophisticated and deeply critical. Her creative process often begins in the analog realm, utilizing her own photographs, video stills, or even embroidered motifs inherited from past generations. These foundational materials are then digitally transformed using a suite of AI tools, including Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and Perplexity for image generation. For her video-related works, she employs tools such as Deforum, Runway, and Kaiber AI.
A CRITICAL APPROACH TO AI PLATFORMS
Her selection of AI platforms is not arbitrary; it’s a meticulous process driven by artistic intent and a keen awareness of each tool’s capabilities and limitations. “My first stage is to find the right prompt. Then I choose the most suitable platform based on how well it performs for that specific idea. Each platform has its own strengths, limitations, and biases, so I adapt my approach accordingly,” she explains. This pragmatic yet critical approach underscores her understanding that AI, while powerful, is not infallible or impartial.
While many celebrate AI’s potential to democratize creativity, Menlibayeva maintains a healthy skepticism. She warns that “AI is a complex tool with both democratizing potential and the risk of reinforcing new hierarchies,” noting that “AI systems are often controlled by large corporations, which influences access and power.” This astute observation highlights the economic and political structures that underpin AI development and deployment, which can inadvertently perpetuate existing inequalities or create new ones.
Despite these reservations, Menlibayeva chooses to engage with AI because she recognizes its capacity as a “distorted mirror.” She posits that AI doesn’t create anything truly new, but rather reconfigures what its training data makes possible. By intentionally inserting her own images, personal myths, and historical archives into the AI’s processes, she orchestrates a profound dialogue between algorithmic systems and human history. “AI acts both as a tool and a distorted mirror, reflecting the hidden codes, preferences, and limitations of its creators: data, culture, and power,” she says. “I consciously engage with these biases, embedding my personal mythologies into the process.” This method allows her to subvert the algorithms, making them reflect and interrogate, rather than merely replicate, the biases embedded within their datasets.
“HUMANIZING AI” – AN ARTIST’S IMPERATIVE
Almagul Menlibayeva’s definition of “humanizing AI” diverges significantly from the popular notion of teaching machines to mimic human empathy or intelligence. For her, humanizing AI is not about making machines more human-like; it is about injecting profound human stories, memories, and acts of resistance into their cold, logical framework. It is about challenging the prevailing narratives and data sets that often perpetuate existing power structures and erasures. In her artistic practice, AI becomes a revolutionary tool for recovering what state archives, official history books, and dominant media have deliberately refused to preserve or acknowledge.
Her work implicitly argues that the responsibility for ensuring AI serves humanity’s broader interests lies not solely with programmers or engineers, but fundamentally with artists. Artists, with their unique capacity for critical inquiry, emotional expression, and narrative construction, are uniquely positioned to interrogate AI’s biases and shape its output in ways that reflect a more diverse and complex human experience. “That is why, as an artist, I try not to obey this logic, but to transform it. Humanizing AI is not the task of programmers, it is the task of artists,” she asserts.
EMBEDDING RESISTANCE INTO ALGORITHMS
By consciously integrating her personal mythologies, cultural memory, and the narratives of the oppressed into AI systems, Menlibayeva demonstrates how art can serve as a form of digital activism. She pushes back against the idea of AI as an objective or neutral arbiter of reality, instead highlighting its capacity to be shaped by human intent, even when that intent is disruptive or counter-hegemonic. This approach has profound implications for the future of creative AI:
- Challenging Data Bias: Her work exposes how existing biases in training data can perpetuate harmful stereotypes and historical omissions, while simultaneously demonstrating how artists can introduce alternative data to counteract this.
- Democratizing Storytelling: By allowing marginalized voices and censored histories to emerge through AI-generated imagery, she offers a model for democratizing access to narrative creation and dissemination.
- Redefining Artistic Agency: Menlibayeva redefines the artist’s role in the age of AI, moving beyond mere tool-user to become a conceptual architect who guides and critiques algorithmic processes.
In essence, Menlibayeva’s work is a powerful reminder that technology, no matter how advanced, remains a reflection of human choices and values. Through her art, she compels us to look beyond the surface of AI, to understand its underlying mechanisms, and to critically engage with its potential to either perpetuate or dismantle existing power structures. Her commitment to using AI as a means of historical and cultural reclamation offers a compelling vision for a future where technology can indeed serve as a powerful ally in the pursuit of truth and memory.
CONCLUSION
Almagul Menlibayeva stands as a pioneering figure at the vanguard of art and artificial intelligence. Her profound engagement with AI transcends mere technological experimentation; it is a deeply considered, ethical, and politically charged artistic practice aimed at historical recovery and cultural resistance. By weaving together the threads of ancient tradition with the cutting edge of digital innovation, she creates compelling counternarratives that challenge state censorship and algorithmic bias.
Through installations like Posthuman Matter: The Map of Nomadizing Reimaginings #3 and evocative works like AI Realism: Qantar 2022, Menlibayeva not only brings erased histories to light but also inspires critical thought about the technologies shaping our world. Her unique vision of “humanizing AI” — by embedding human stories, memories, and acts of resistance into its very logic — offers a powerful template for how artists can reclaim agency in an increasingly automated landscape. In a world grappling with the pervasive influence of AI, Menlibayeva’s art reminds us that human creativity, critical consciousness, and the imperative to remember remain the most potent forces in shaping a more truthful and inclusive future.