Artist Jackson 2bears explains the many uses of AI during annual Pratt lecture
On January 13, Kanien’kehà:ka (Mohawk) visual artist Jackson 2bears delivered the annual Pratt lecture to an enthusiastic crowd in the Motyer-Fancy theatre. During the lecture, 2bears describes his research creation process, co-directing the Otekh Lab at Western University, and the Abundant Intelligences network.“It was one of the only conversations about AI that I’ve had recently that I have come away hopeful from!” says event attendee and Mt.A student Emma Neilson.
2bears is part of the international abundant intelligences research program, an initiative reimagining how AI can be conceptualized based on Indigenous knowledge systems, to support Indigenous communities, and used to build databases and archives of knowledge. For 2bears, it has sometimes been difficult to get the support of his community to develop these archives, as before stories were kept in the “heart,” and 2bears is now trying to “keep the knowledge alive” in a different way, in the large language model (LLM).
2bears is co-director of Otekhnòtshera Ratirihwisaks Etho:onhwentsyáke (Otekh), a research-creation lab in the visual arts department at Western University supporting advanced Indigenous arts and technology research. In an interview with The Argosy, 2bears explains how the Otekh lab is currently working on a language revitalization project using an open source LLM, that has already been pre-trained. Using a dog as an example, 2bears explains how Otekh teaches the LLM in the Mohawk language. A dog is called “erhar” and “we think of [dogs] as a companion species, so we would start to teach it differently how to think of a dog.” The goal of Otekh is to have an LLM be able to think and speak in Mohawk or in Blackfoot, both by using the language and by having embodied the theories and philosophies of those communities.
During the question period, Shary Boyle, a local artist and one of the 2025 Pratt lecturers, asked a question on the tip of many people’s tongues concerning how 2bears reconciles with the environmental damage caused by data centres running the AI technology. 2bears reassured Boyle and the audience the data centres they were building were not “meant to serve the globe.” 2bears says everything they are running now is laptop-based and they are in the process of getting an environmental assessment of their impact. Their data centre is cooled with a bedroom fan borrowed from a friend’s bedroom. 2bears says there is a big difference between training a supervised model, which requires massive data centres, and the work his team is doing to retrain unsupervised models. To put this into perspective, 2bears says editing a ten-minute video uses more energy than what they are doing with AI.
Inspiring 2bears’ artistic practice is author Vine Deloria Jr. During 2bears’ talk he described one of Deloria’s theories of their being of two world views: a Western philosophy based in time and a Tribal philosophy based in space. By basing itself in time, Western thinking tends to rely on linearity throughout history, inspiring ideas of “manifested destiny” and the “enfolding of a giant plan.” When the focus shifts from time to space, stories have “duration” and are “dimensional,” according to 2bears. “When we think about walking in our land, we are thinking about walking through our historical narratives, walking with our ancestors,” says 2bears. “We think about our stories and histories as being written on the land.” Ideas about being based in space have permeated 2bears’ work as a philosophical, spiritual, and real material truth, inspiring video installations, advanced computational systems, and finding ways for those works to connect back to land and community.
2bears’ teaching, similar to his practice, is geared towards integrating media and land-based practices. At Western University, he has developed an interdisciplinary course called “Landmarks,” inspired by Indigenous worldviews about land. In “Landmarks,” instead of assigning projects, the class functions as an artist collective that creates communally. Recently, the class participated in a medicinal activity called “Snow Snake,” where they built a race track in the snow and raced “snakes” carved wood. Participating students then built an installation that 2bears says “looks like a vortex,” using the documentation from cameras on the snakes and the goal post.