Minne Atairu

Minne Atairu is an interdisciplinary artist and doctoral student in the Art and Art Education program at Teachers College of Columbia University. Minne's research emerges at the intersection of machine learning, art education and hip-hop pedagogy. Through the use of Artificial Intelligence (StyleGAN, GPT-3), Minne recombines historical fragments, sculptures, texts, images, and sounds to generate synthetic Benin Bronzes which often hinge on questions of repatriation and post-repatriation. For Minne's residency at the Movement Lab, she will focus on developing a CGI film using motion and facial capture technologies.

Work Title: Regina Gloriana, 2024

Medium: Text-to-Video (Sora by Open AI)

Video Length: 1m 37s

Background Sound: Text-to-Sound (MusicFX by Google), Keywords: Trap + Orchestra

Work Description: Regina Gloriana (2024) draws inspiration from two supernatural horror films produced in 1990s Nollywood (Nigeria’s cinema)—Nneka, the Pretty Serpent (1994) and Karishika (1996). Using text-based prompts in SORA, I reinterpret the visual effects that these films deployed to animate Mami Wata—a femme-presenting, amphibious, and shape-shifting West African God—as a terrifying figure. These 90s evangelical films not only sought to dissuade Mami Wata devotion but also arbitrated Pentecostal-Christian values through uncanny VFX that continues to haunt my imagination. For this reason, I have yet to watch the 2020 sequel of Nneka, the Pretty Serpent.