The Tech Policy Press Podcast

Episode: Through to Thriving: Connecting Art and Policy with Mimi Ọnụọha
Host: Anika Collier Navaroli (Tech Policy Press Fellow)
Guest: Mimi Ọnụọha (Artist)
Date: November 2, 2025

Overview

This episode of "Through to Thriving" features Anika Collier Navaroli in conversation with artist Mimi Ọnụọha. Together, they delve into the vital intersections between art and tech policy: how art can help us imagine new futures, the role of artists in bearing witness (especially in turbulent political times), and what policy practitioners can learn from the artistic process. The discussion ranges from personal anecdotes to broader philosophical reflections—exploring exclusion and absence in data, the limitations of policy and technology, and the collaborative potential for shaping a more humane and inclusive future.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Shifting Language of Technology

[03:05–05:43]

• Reflection on terminology change: The term “big data” has faded from popular discourse, replaced by buzzwords like “AI” and “datafication.” Both speakers note the irony that, despite the changing language, data-driven processes are more pervasive than ever.
• Mimi: “That’s the irony, is that we’re still dealing with big data, right? We’re just not talking about it.” [03:43]

2. Defining Artists and Their Role

[06:22–07:28]

• Mimi on art vs. artists: She prefers to define artists rather than art: “Artists bear witness. That’s our job. Our job is to face reality without flinching and to help others see it.” [07:06]
• Cites inspirations from Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Rick Rubin.

3. Art and Authoritarianism: The Function of Witnessing

[07:28–10:04]

• Role of artists in regimes: Art can provide clarity and historical memory during times when reality feels “unmoored and unstable.”
• Mimi: “In these moments of huge change and turmoil, you actually need people who have a way of thinking differently about the world...” [09:08]
• Artists of post-colonial Nigeria cited as examples of artists becoming policymakers.

4. Art vs. Journalism: Parallels and Contrasts

[10:04–12:40]

• Parallels drawn between artists and journalists as “witnesses,” but Mimi distinguishes the slower timescale and subtlety of art versus the immediacy and perceived threat of journalism.
• Mimi: “Art isn’t seen as…threatening. Journalism is very much, this is the moment, this is the now… but often a lot of us [artists], it’s like we’re also…one level down. We have a slower timescale.” [11:18]

5. Art, Technology, and Process

[15:04–17:40]

• Mimi describes how coming of age during the rise of Web 2.0 and attending NYU’s ITP program inspired her to merge technology and art as means for inquiry and sense-making.
• Mimi: “When you’re an artist, if you call yourself an artist, that doesn’t say anything about your tools, what you use. It gives you a lot of latitude, and I wanted that latitude.” [17:22]

6. The Catcalling Project: Agency, Data, and Power

[18:09–23:15]

• Mimi recounts an “intervention” project in which she gave catcallers in Brooklyn a phone number that connected to a server sending automated responses, creating a dynamic but unintentional data set.
• Insight into data as relationship: the true art was in the process and interactions, not the data set’s generation.
• Mimi: “Framing it as just data—just a set of phone numbers—minimized everything else that was so interesting to me about it.” [21:34]

7. Missing Data Sets: Power, Exclusion, and Protection

[24:19–32:49]

• Mimi’s ongoing project, “Library of Missing Data Sets,” catalogs the absences in publicly available data, often revealing deliberate or structural choices about what—and who—gets counted.
• Classic example: lack of a data set of civilians killed by police, and the reasons (power, incentive, protection) behind such omissions.
• Mimi: “There are patterns of absence and there are reasons for why things are not collected…The people who have the ability to collect don’t have the incentive. And the people who have the incentive have a much more reduced ability to be able to collect it.” [25:53]
• Exploration of cases from Black Broadway demographics to unmapped geographic spaces; the limitations of metrification and the caution against universal datafication.

8. The Limits of Datafication and Technological Scope

[32:49–33:14]

• Mimi pushes back against the tech sector's demand to fill all missing data: “The point is that we can’t do that. Data is one way of making sense of the world…It’s not everything.” [32:07]

9. Art as Critique of Technological & Policy Imagination

[33:14–43:25]

• Discussion of LLMs (large language models) and misplaced priorities in AI development.
• Reference to an early installation using Google search data to illustrate communal privacy and data thinness; art’s role in embodying surveillance critique and collective reflection.

10. The Future is Here: Art Revealing the Labor Behind Technology

[37:39–42:11]

• Piece: “The Future is Here” explores the hidden, global human labor (e.g., content moderation, data labeling) behind AI and machine learning.
• Mimi: “It was so great to ground it, to be like this work happens in a place, by people. This isn’t just in the cloud…we’re talking about real people, real labor.” [40:00]
• Art’s power to make visible the invisible infrastructure and humanity of tech.

11. From Revealing the System to Imagining Alternatives

[43:25–46:02]

• Mimi discusses a shift in her practice: from solely revealing technology’s structures (“Look at this house tech has built”) to questioning who “we” are, what alternatives we might desire, and how to go deeper.
• Mimi: “Now I think I’m more interested in…what are the alternatives? Or what is the ground that house is built upon?” [43:25]

12. Hopes for Art, Policy & Collaboration in the Future

[44:55–49:10]

• Emphasis on complementary roles: “I think we need to recognize ourselves as different parts of the same body. The arm does something different than the leg, but you need both. Use both when you walk.” [44:57]
• Critique as an act of love, expanding who is seen as “fully human.”
• Mimi: “Our hopes and our critiques should be intertwined…that critique is coming from a place of love, which I feel like is sorely missing in the US right now.” [45:50]

13. The Relationship Between Artists and Policy Practitioners

[47:43–49:10]

• Final thoughts emphasize that both policy and art are tools for shaping society—art “makes power felt, not just described” and operates “in the murkiness below the rules.”
• Memorable Quote: “Art can make power felt, not just described. It can get at that layer below the rules and the language and governance. That layer is what is fueling so much of our political movements.” [48:38]
• The conversation ends where it began: on art’s capacity to touch both “spirit and mind,” and on the urgent need for coalitional thinking.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Mimi Ọnụọha [07:06]:
  “Artists bear witness. That’s our job. Our job is to face reality without flinching and to help others see it.”
• Mimi Ọnụọha [09:08]:
  “In these moments of huge change and turmoil, you actually need people who have a way of thinking differently about the world…those same people come in, and they also have something to say about what it means to run a country or who we are as a people.”
• Mimi Ọnụọha [13:50]:
  “The guard is not as high up at all…because they do see art mostly as like, you’re gonna come and paint the mural at the end of the work…you can sometimes leverage that position.”
• Mimi Ọnụọha [21:34]:
  “In focusing on those phone numbers in that data set, what it did was it just minimized everything else that was so interesting to me…what I found, so I just could not get. Get over, was that in focusing on those phone numbers in that data set, what it did was it just minimized everything else that was so interesting to me about it.”
• Mimi Ọnụọha [25:53]:
  “The people who have the ability to collect don’t have the incentive. And the people who have the incentive have a much more reduced ability to be able to collect it.”
• Mimi Ọnụọha [32:07]:
  “The point is that we can’t do that. There are some areas where we can, but there are some areas where we can’t…Data is one way of making sense of the world…It’s not everything.”
• Mimi Ọnụọha [40:00]:
  “This work happens in a place, by people. This isn’t just in the cloud…the cloud’s not in the sky.”
• Mimi Ọnụọha [44:57]:
  “I think we need to recognize ourselves as different parts of the same body. The arm does something different than the leg, but you need both. Use both when you walk.”
• Mimi Ọnụọha [45:50]:
  “Our hopes and our critiques should be intertwined…that critique is coming from a place of love, which I feel like is sorely missing in the US right now.”
• Mimi Ọnụọha [48:38]:
  “Art can make power felt, not just described. It can get at that layer below the rules and the language and governance. That layer is what is fueling so much of our political movements. That’s what good art can tap into.”
• Anika Collier Navaroli [49:10]:
  “I feel you in my spirit.”

Important Timestamps

• 03:05–05:43 — The evolution of tech language and data’s growing invisibility
• 06:22–07:28 — Defining art and the role of bearing witness
• 07:54–10:04 — Art’s place in authoritarian regimes and moments of societal change
• 11:18 — On art being less threatening (or not)
• 13:50 — Being an artist as a form of “cover” or access
• 18:09–23:15 — The Catcalling Project and art as relational data
• 24:19–32:49 — Missing data sets, power, and intentional absences
• 37:39–42:11 — “The Future is Here” and making human labor in AI visible
• 44:55–49:10 — Imagining futures and the essential collaboration between artists and policy practitioners

Takeaway

This episode powerfully explores how art and policy are not separate worlds but deeply interconnected methods for making sense of—and reshaping—our rapidly changing social and technological landscape. Mimi Ọnụọha’s work reveals the hidden dynamics behind data, technology, and power, challenging us not just to witness but to imagine, critique, and build together. The conversation is a call for collaborative imagination, honesty, and humanity in shaping the future of technology and democracy.