Backslash at Cornell Tech, dedicated to advancing new works of art and technology that escape convention, has announced Nigerian-American artist Mimi Ọnụọha as its first Backslash Fellow.
Ọnụọha is an artist-in-residence at Cornell Tech, embedding her creative practice in the new Backslash Studio at the Tata Innovation Center and allowing her to foster collaboration between researchers and students on the Roosevelt Island campus. Ọnụọha was selected because she uses technology to take her practice in bold, unconventional directions.
“We are honored to recognize Mimi as the first Backslash Fellow,” said Greg Pass, founder of Backslash and former Chief Entrepreneurial Officer at Cornell Tech. “Mimi’s unorthodox applications of technology perfectly represent the nonlinear artistic practices we champion with Backslash.”
As a Backslash Fellow, Ọnụọha receives a grant valued at $60,000. This includes an honorarium, travel stipend, project materials, and support for collaboration with Ph.D. and master’s students at Cornell Tech.
Ọnụọha is developing a docufiction film about a custom predictive machine learning model that she teamed up with the Human Rights Data Analysis Group to build. “This work feels like a marked evolution for me personally,” said Ọnụọha. “In this work — and aided by the support and resources of Backslash — I want to push my practice a step further and create a work that talks about history, land, and machine learning in a way that isn’t typically seen.”
Ọnụọha will collaborate with Cornell Tech Computer Science Professor Noah Snavely and his research group to reconstruct 3D scenes from 2D photography, combining archival research footage and materials with footage developed by computer vision techniques.
“The rapid advancements in computer vision have the ability to push boundaries across many creative sectors, and we are already inspired by the collaborations we have had with Backslash artists,” said Snavely. “Mimi’s documentary work presents our research group with a unique opportunity to integrate bleeding-edge computer vision and graphics technology with art.”
Ọnụọha has historically worked at the intersection of art and technology to question and expose contradictory logics of technological progress. Using technological mediums such as code, data, and video, her pieces offer new orientations for making sense of absences in the systems of labor, ecology, and relations.
Since 2016, Backslash has supported artists and Cornell University students across the Ithaca and Cornell Tech campuses whose practices are unconventional, adventurous, intense, and primed for engagement with new technologies. Backslash is inspired by the \ keyboard character, known as an escape character in computer programming, indicating that the characters after the \ should be interpreted outside the normal mode of input and output to do something special.
