Jason Edward Lewis and Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada founded the Hawaiian and Indigenous Future Imaginaries Lab, or the HIFI Lab, to direct thought and art around emerging technologies like artificial intelligence.
One of their missions is to integrate Indigenous perspectives into artificial intelligence development. They emphasized the importance of imagination in Hawaiian culture — one of the reasons they were prompted to create the HIFI Lab.
"Forgetting that imagination is a traditional value that we've practiced for a really long time, and kind of that gets left out of our cultural kind of revival and renormalization," said Kuwada, an associate professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
The lab launched an Artist Fellowship focusing on AI to foster cross-disciplinary collaboration among Indigenous artists. The first fellow, Jocelyn Kapumealani Ng, addresses social and cultural issues through different art mediums.
"We had been doing workshops with Indigenous youth and one of the things that we found was there wasn't a lot of spaces in their lives where somebody sat down and said, 'Okay, so what kind of future do you imagine for yourself? What kind of future do you want?" said Lewis, a professor of design and computation arts at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.
Lewis and Kuwada spoke to The Conversation more about creating space for Indigenous people to continue asking questions about their future.
The lab's first AI workshop takes place this week and is sold out.
This interview aired on The Conversation on Feb. 25, 2025. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m.
