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
On Wednesday January 12th 2022, Dr. Ramon Amaro will present an interactive lecture based on his forthcoming book The Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being. Amaro digs into the history of statistical analysis and uncovers a history of data being used to impose racial hierarchies and create methods of human sorting and population control. By tracing this history, he contends that “machine learning bias” isn’t a new issue. Rather, it’s part of a pervasive logic of statistical sorting that makes use of contemporary technologies to enact its aims, be they colonial, eugenic or some other mechanism. He ends with a theoretical analysis of black negation and asks - what needs to be altered to fully aspire? Instead of abandoning machine learning altogether, can we live through such processes and simultaneously enact another sense of being?
You are invited to join this virtual event, and are encouraged to consider the following brief preparation:
- In preparation, I ask that each student bring either a physical (preferable), digital, or cultural ‘object’ of their choosing. This object can be anything. However, I ask that each student identify one historical fact (preferably technical, mathematical, or cultural) associated either directly or indirectly with their chosen object. The historical fact should originate before 2000, however the object can be from any time period.
Dr. Ramon Amaro’s writing, research and practice emerge at the intersections of Black Study, psychopathology, digital culture, and the critique of computational reason. He draws on Frantz Fanon’s theory of sociogenic alienation to problematize the de-localisation of the Black psyché in contemporary computational systems, such as machine learning and artificial intelligence. Ramon’s research pulls away from notions of psychic negation, as set forth by the Fanonian model of representation, to investigate alternative modes of relation between humans, race and technology. His ultimate aim is to develop new methodologies for the study of human centered technology. Dr. Amaro has held research residencies at Het Niew Instituut, Piet Zwarte Instituut, and he participated in the Schemas of Uncertainty research group at the Sandberg Instituut.
Register for Streaming Link:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-black-technical-object-lecture-by-ramon-amaro-tickets-239403732007
