Technology in the Public Interest

Kate Rich, in conversation with TITiPI

Plublished in FoAM0s anarchive: https://anarchive.fo.am/silver/technology_in_the_public_interest/  

 

Picket signs for the Trans*feminist Digital Depletion Strike, March 2023.

 

"Instituting for TITiPI is an attempt to go against an as-a-service approach where everything should be flexible and instantaneous. Instead, we want to structure for collective generosity and exuberance at a time when too many things are on fire. So TITiPI's critique is not anti-institutional but about the need to institute otherwise. It is linked to the particular abolitionist politics we are committed to, which means we need to think about what infrastructures we need to dismantle, as much as which ones we need to build. "

"Public interest should be about these modes of care, of supporting life, beyond just a basic idea of care – and we shouldn’t shy away from practical solutions either! That's the type of reimagining we're interested in: that the public interest might be that. And then how to do that is really hard! "

"That reimagining happens across space-times including rebellious memories, inventive side-steps or uncomfortable prospections, so it's not only the projection of a future of linear progress, in a developmentist sense. That is one of the fundamental spell-breakings "

 Full conversation -> https://anarchive.fo.am/silver/technology_in_the_public_interest/

 

on the problem of Indexing for Disability Justice: blocks, plates, boards, volumes and shafts

in conversation with Ren Loren Britton and Lieks Hettinga

  "There is an ongoing controversy, an ongoing renegotiation. We can see around a political need and desire to keep on considering; so not to close, or foreclose, not to not to arrive to a final consensus on what categories are there. An ontological openendedness if I may call it so. This means to take care of the redistribution of the sensible in the midst of such conditions, including an ontology of shape-shifting aesthetics which is constantly moving, with categories constantly differing from one another and in constant tension. I think this is also politically generative — to think about categories, and this ontology they make from an aesthetic perspective.

I wanted to celebrate the way in which your work, Ren, is really in love with the slipperiness of language. This is also a form of bringing language to places where it feels more poetic and not so much only descriptive. I celebrate this because language was never exclusively about the very technical accountability of the word, to begin with.

And to return to what I was saying earlier, slipperiness is a means for staying with the ongoing redistribution of the sensible in the linguistic realm. When you do that, many other forms also enter the mode and become slippery fields - like spreadsheets as containers which also eventually overflow. Thanks to poetics very grey corners of the world, like spreadsheets, gain some glitter in a radical political sense."

+ Full conversation: https://www.indexingfordisabilityjustice.info/conversation

+ Access to Ren's project: https://www.indexingfordisabilityjustice.info/

 

All the Feels, conversation with Simone C. Niquille

ALL THE FEELS
Simone C. Niquille (designer and researcher)
Moderator: Jara Rocha (researcher and cultural mediator)

In an article published at e-flux under the title “Too Much Information”, Simone C. Niquille walks us through a number of operations on capture technology and polygonal remodeling of facial gestures, each providing an extra layer of definition, towards an analysis of emotions.The ambition to recognise emotion by computer vision technology contains an array of challenges and assumptions: By which parameters are happiness, tiredness, anxiety and/or perplexity detected and measured? How are these emotions translated into algorithmic rules?

‘Too Much Information’ discusses the face as an arena of dispute for attentive markets of so-called realist emotional profiling and dives into the history of computer generated imagery (CGI) technology, a space of simulation and speculation. This talk will be an occasion to dive deeper in those layered operations, wondering about the extent to which values of accuracy are valid when studying mediated emotions from an intersectional perspective.

Bio: http://technofle.sh/cv.php

 

+ info: http://done.fotocolectania.org/edicion5/en/discussions/

»Objetologías: a conversation with Femke Snelting«

*Sunday, 8.2., 4 pm, ABR-Library (2nd floor)*
AKADEMIE SCHLOSS SOLITUDE
(Stuttgart)

What is the attraction of an algorithm? Do servers have a gender? Can a book be a disobedient object? Is it possible to understand an infrastructure as a poetics? Jara Rocha presents Objetologías, a line of research she carries with Josianito Llorente, Jaron Rowan and Carla Boserman. Working on the aesthetics and politics of objects and technologies in their different material conditions, they speculate about the potentials and relatedness of humans and non-humans. Their attempt at a post-humanist approach brings together studies of culture, science and technology, actor-network theory, new materialisms, speculative realism, futurology and affects theory. Objetologías considers the ethic, erotic, aesthetic and political agency of objects, and studies their material conditions in a broad sense: scale, durability, weight, volume, attraction, dispersion. Instead of studying the social use of objects and technologies, they shift their attention to ontologies, understanding processes of individuation, co-production and articulation as basic gestures that act symmetrically in the complex web of materiality.

Tea and cake served!



*CROSS-READING*

Ahmed, S. (2006) Queer Phenomenology (Duke University Press)
Bennett, J.,(2010) Vibrant Matter. A political ecology of things (Duke University Press)
Bogost, I. (2012) Alien Phenomenology, or What it's like to be a thing (University of Minnesota Press)
Braidotti, R., (2002) Metamorphoses. Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Oxford: Blackwell)
Butler, J. & Athanasiou, A., (2013) Dispossession. The Performative in the Political (Cambridge: Polity Press)

Haraway, D., (1992) "The Promises of Monsters", at Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula A. Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies (New York; Routledge) , pp. 295-337.

Harman, G.,(2012) The Third Table (dOCUMENTA(13))

Hayles, K., (1999) How we became Posthuman (University of Chicago Press)

Kittler, F., (1999) Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (writing science) (Stanford University Press)

Latour, B. (1993) We have never been Modern (Harvard University Press)

Meillassoux, Q.,  (2008) After Finitude. An essay on the necessity of contingency (NYC: Continuum Books)

Thrift, N., (2008) Non-Representational Theory. Space, Politics, Affects (NY: Routledge)

Lampland, M. & Star S.L., (Eds) (2009) Standards and Their Stories: How Quantifying, Classifying, and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press)