On Bias and Belonging: Suchi Reddy, Artist in Residence

Throughout this academic year, Suchi Reddy, Colgate University's 2024-25 Christian A. Johnson Artist in Residence, is hosting a series of community conversations on bias and belonging in artificial intelligence (AI), centered on ways bias impacts our lived experience.

A New York City-based architect, designer, and artist, Reddy plans to use the information from these conversations to create a textile that will represent what people think and feel about the ideas of bias and belonging, both in their personal and communal experiences. She will use the new TC2 digital loom in Colgate's recently opened Fabulation Lab, located in Bernstein Hall on the new Middle Campus, to create the woven artifact. The final product will be exhibited in the Clifford Gallery this spring.

At the first event on Oct. 23, attendees discussed their earliest life experiences with bias and belonging.

Margaretha Haughwout, associate professor of art, introduced Reddy to the students, faculty, and staff in attendance, as a "down-to-earth artist." Reddy's work "engages material innovation and interactive technologies in the service of expressing ideas around the power of community," Haughwout said.

Thanks to her architectural training, Reddy has a spatial and experience-oriented approach to art. "I relate primarily through space," she said. "I'm always thinking in terms of how our environments are not just these passive containers for us."

According to Reddy, our physical environments have a greater impact on our human experience than we may realize, being intertwined with our emotional, psychological, and cultural experiences. With this project, she endeavors to collect information about this dynamic human experience and transform it into art.

Reddy is collecting more than words to inspire this project. "Even if you don't say anything, I can see that you're thinking about your experience," she told the audience. "This energy will be part of the work too. What you're sending to me now will be the colors and the patterns that create this textile. So when you see it, just know that you're a part of it, even if you don't recognize yourself in it."

Reddy also hopes to understand how artificial intelligence (AI) is already integrated into our lives and what sort of biases shape our interaction with it currently. She believes our influence on AI will be either good or bad - not neutral - and we should be thoughtful about the ways we are moving forward with the technology. She hopes that AI will reflect our human-ness, eventually. "I can imagine when we don't exist anymore and all that's left is what we made, I would hope that it reflects us in the most complete way possible."