Opaque Prompting as an Invocation – Ein unentfernbares Denkmal für Ari

Workshop as part of "They Say I'm Dead"

The "Ari" peace statue in Berlin was threatened with removal. If the physical monument on the square is forcibly dismantled, must it disappear from our memory forever? What if we could transform it into a "spirit" - a resilient presence that no political authority can destroy?

As part of the group presentation They Say I'm dead, artist Jinran Ha invites us to a collective ritual of memory and algorithmic resistance. Jinran Ha explores Samsin Halmae - a Korean spirit of birth and care - and the ways in which AI represents non-Western spirits through a colonial lens.

In this workshop, we will engage with AI image generators, but we are not trying to create perfect images. AI systems often fail to understand marginalized and feminist narratives and reduce them to biased stereotypes. Instead of feeding direct descriptions to the machine, we will write "opaque prompts" - spells woven from metaphors of care, entanglement and resistance. We will embrace the machine's confusion and use its failure to protect Ari from algorithmic capture.

No prior knowledge of AI or art is required. Come with your solidarity and let's build a decentralized monument that can never be removed. The workshop will be in English, the prompts can be written in any language.

Yeni Ma is the curator of the project They Say I'm Dead. Based on the haunting apparitions that return through Ari, she has initiated an ongoing discussion with the artists around Avery Gordon's Ghostly Matters - tracing how invisible beings continue to impact the present.