Recipes for a Technological Undoing invites students to work across disciplines to generate new understandings of how artists and designers can combat techno-determinism. We seek to unravel the assumption that technological progress in the way it has manifested was inevitable and will continue to be so. Undoing the structures that seek to quantify, rank, capture, and predict our endless ways of being.
The technologies we wish to undo are those that claim to predict social outcomes, those that perpetuate a hierarchy or preference based on race, gender, sexuality, or physical ability. In the lectures, we will learn how these preferences are encoded in the technologies themselves. And build away from a history of science that centers a white, Western epistemology.
We will learn how the disciplining of knowledge - the separation of the arts and humanities from the sciences - enables automated bias.
We will (physically) meet weekly on Thursday afternoons, usually between 16:00 and 18:00
ENROLL
https://forms.gle/VNHis58uyQKMWzcN6
DELIVERY
We will learn from guest lecturers of multi-hyphenated practices. Visionaries who will help stretch our understanding of what is possible. Prioritizing voices of those who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.
GUEST LECTURERS
Katherine McKittrick
Abeba Birhane
Ariana Dongus
Ramon Amaro
WORKSHOPS
To be announced
DISCUSSIONS
The discussion sessions are moments for us to come together as a class to connect and reflect. Bringing our own urgencies into discussion and sharing any new insights with the group.
MAILING LIST
https://forms.gle/TtRebWAU7KedoDwf6
A visit to the Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam, followed by a conversation between Evie Evans and Flavia Dzodan.
Black Method / Curiosity & Wonder
Link below to enroll
16:00-18:00
Ladipo Famodu
Lauren Napoles Gonzalez Fong
Alec Mateo
Flavia Dzodan
2021
BA & MA students
https://www.eventbrite.com/manage/events/203169705057/tickets
Livestream: https://youtu.be/DxfuPRw9smg
In this lecture, Birhane will share how systems of algorithmic classification, ordering, and prediction work to impose legibility on inherently complex, dynamic, and fluid aspects of human nature. Departing from embodied and enactive cognitive sciences, she describes humans and social systems as irreducible to our measurable averages. Positing that “there is no clear line demarcating where the mind ends and the world begins.” This approach recognizes that uncertainty, ambiguity, and fluidity, not static dichotomies, exemplify human beings and our interactions.
Abeba Birhane is a cognitive science researcher at the Complex Software Lab in the school of computer science at University college Dublin, Ireland. Her interdisciplinary research sits at the intersection of complex adaptive systems, machine learning, and critical race studies.
"On the one hand, complexity science tells us that people, as complex adaptive systems are inherently indeterminable. On the other, machine learning systems that claim to predict human behavior are becoming ubiquitous in all spheres of social life. Machine prediction, when deployed to high-stake situations, not only is erroneous but also presents real harm to those at the margins of society. I examine questions of such nature in my work."
The Impossibility of Automating Ambiguity
Lecture by Abeba Birhane
Thursday November 4th
16:00 - 18:00
Sandberg Theory Stairs (on campus, enter near the garden)
Fred. Roeskestraat 96 1076 ED Amsterdam
This event is held in collaboration with Unsettling and the extraintra program The Embodied Knowledge Bureau.
