Fireside Chat on "Machine Learning, Sociogeny & Race"

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Discussion with Ezekiel Dixon-Román at Recursive Colonialisms

https://recursivecolonialism.com/topics/haunting/

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"Posthuman Convergences" offers an overview of contemporary debates around the ‘posthuman turn’. It explores the implications of the posthuman convergence of posthumanism and postanthropocentrism for the constitution of subjectivity, the production of knowledge and the practice of the academic humanities.

The aim of this interdisciplinary  course is to track the convergences between different branches of posthuman knowledge production. It starts by offering a selected overview of contemporary scholarship on the ‘posthuman turn,’  notably its applications and implications in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The posthuman turn is defined as the convergence, within the context of advanced or cognitive capitalism, of post-humanism on the one hand and post-anthropocentrism on the other. Although these lines of critical thought often overlap, they are distinct phenomena both in terms of their theoretical genealogies and their practical applications.

A related aim of the course is to introduce and apply Braidotti’s specific brand of neo-materialist, critical feminist posthuman theory. This approach rests on two main concepts: the emphasis on the embodied and embedded, relational and affective structure of subjectivity and the grounded and accountable nature of knowledge claims. These aspects will be connected through the emphasis on perspectival politics of locations on the one hand and affirmative relational ethics on the other. Participants will be required to read Braidotti’s classic text The Posthuman (Polity Press, 2013) prior to the start of the course.

In order to evaluate posthuman convergences and knowledge(s), the course will present, explore and assess  the defining features of a selected number of fields within the fast-growing Posthumanities, such as the Environmental, Digital and Medical Humanities. Key questions are: what is the object of enquiry of these emergent areas of research? How do these new fields of knowledge affect the constitution of subjectivity and practice of academic research today? Mindful of the differences in power and access that structure the debate on the posthuman, we will also investigate how posthuman knowledge(s) can assist us in moving beyond the patterns of exclusion of the sexualized, racialized and naturalized “others” that were not recognized as belonging fully to humanity and were also disqualified as subjects of knowledge.

The course will furthermore endeavour to present a selection of concrete case-studies drawn from the Environmental, Digital and Medical Humanities. These cases will be presented by teams of participating scholars from a range of disciplines and interdisciplinary areas of research, notably: literature and cultural studies, pedagogy, media and technology studies, legal theory, philosophy and the arts. Throughout the course, special efforts will be made to highlight the crucial contribution of art practices to all areas of posthuman scholarship and research.

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A Critical Moment. Data are defining this moment in ways that reveal the precarity and power of Black, Brown and Indigenous populations, but also the unharnessed potential of scientific method to yield knowledge that can “STEM” the oppressive tide of post-1619 pandemics. What does precarity, power, and pandemics mean about how we go about our scientific work, or the methods we could wield in potentially catalytic and transformative ways? ICQCM seeks a dialogue about methodologies that recognizes a return to normal practices after this critical moment is a return to precarity and complicity through our research.

Critical to the Future. Latinx and Black populations constitute a combined 11.8 and 19.1 percent of all students taking data science and analysis courses, respectively, despite being 32 and 29 percent of all undergraduate students and working-age populations, respectively, in 2016.2 This maldistribution of data scientists is not by chance. The data-science divide has thrived on racial/ethnic and gendered disparities in access to STEM, biased instructional practices, and its application to marginalizing regimes and colonial practices that reproduced instead of eliminated structural and systemic inequities. A future in which the interests of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous populations are reflected in the practice and impact of QCM requires that critical methodological approaches are made available to those who we entrust to produce both transformative research and the next generation of scientific innovators.

Critical Methodologies. There are many tensions to transcend for those who are interested in a critical methodology, among them: that methodologies shape both opportunity structures and inequalities, as well as skills and identities in the academy. That they both mask and reveal power imbalances between historically marginalized and privileged communities. That they simultaneously reflect an objective material reality and an unachieved positivist panacea. That they advance science but also pseudo-justifications for westernized/colonial imperialism. And ultimately, that they simultaneously complement and challenge critical frameworks and scholars who have an epistemological commitment to the liberation of Black, Brown and First Nation Peoples.

The ICQCM Inaugural Virtual Symposium: Critical Methodologies for a Critical Moment reflects the urgent need of a data science that provides theoretical intervention and a fuller understanding of the social impact of QCM, but also a dialogue that will frame the technical mission of ICQCM: to provide training in quantitative and computational methods, and their integration into mixed methodologies, to at least 70 underrepresented scholars and affiliates of majority of color institutions of higher education. This conversation is essential to the success of that mission.

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On Machine Learning and the Collective Condition of Black Survival

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Hosted in conjunction with the public lectures organized by the Yale School of Art in tandem with its 150th anniversary and its status as a co-educational professional school of art, scholar and educator Dr. Ramon Amaro will deliver a public lecture on the afternoon of November 20th on his recent research regarding machine learning as it relates to systems of value and racialized exclusion.

In On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Gilbert Simondon argues that alienation in our contemporary techno-culture is caused by an imbalance in our perception and recognition of certain object as having more value than others, which is pronounced by a desire for power in a partial and biased culture. Simondon argues that this condition, or what he describes as an “inadequate rapport” between humans and technology, can be surpassed by building an authentic “awareness” of the existence of technical objects. This dynamic, according to Simondon, is a problem of language, which serves the dual function of identification and exclusion.

In this talk, Dr. Amaro argues that there are similarities between Simondon’s thoughts on human-techno alienation and Frantz Fanon’s treatise on the mastery of language, the “abandoned” racialized object, and the affordances of power. He ground these concepts in machine learning to consider what these provocations might mean in terms of racism and racialized exclusion in non-linear (and therefore, nonrepresentational) computational languages. Ultimately, Dr. Amaro questions how alternative “awarenesses” and systems of value might be achieved in the relation between machine-object-human.

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Architectures of Education is a two-day programme with presentations, screenings, keynotes and workshops seeking to reflect on cultures and architectures of education today, and speculate about what futures may lay on the horizons of knowledge production.

Throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, as pedagogical ideals change, so have their architectural form. The spatial organisation of learning is a field of design that includes the positioning of bodies, the texture and colour of surfaces, the proportionality of objects, programmatic offerings, time scheduling, and beyond. Similarly, learning can be seen as a subject of design, as the process of crafting of minds and characters. With the advancement not just of new learning models but new learning technologies, the classroom and education of tomorrow may not look like how it did today.

The event brings together some of the brightest thinkers and practitioners investigating the relationship between architecture and cultures of education today. The conference is complemented by an online issue with contributions from the speakers, crossposted on e-flux Architecture and The Contemporary Journal, the digital strand of the Public Programmes and Research at Nottingham Contemporary.

Participants include: Ramon Amaro, Sarah Amsler, Kehinde Andrews, Aoife Donnelly and Kristin Trommler, Tom Holert, Anna-Maria Meister, Irit Rogoff, ruangrupa (farid rakun), Ho Rui An, Ola Uduku and Mary Vaughan Johnson

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Materia Abierta is an independent summer program on theory, art, and technology based in Mexico City. It focuses on the study of the social, political, and philosophical impacts of digital media from both a global and local perspective. Conceived as a space to reflect on the ethics of the present and future, the program aims to address the influence of dominant powers on cultural production and to favor marginal forms of knowledge. Materia Abierta is also a flexible prototype of itself. It is a changing platform for researching and articulating methods for learning beyond the limitations of traditional educational structures.

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Tai Kwun Summer Institute, Hong Kong.

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Robot bodies and algorithmic privilege,’ Artistic Strategies from 1980s Beyond: Keith Piper, Tate Modern, London.

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An increasingly large proportion of human reality is now lived through algorithms. While our relationship with AI is undoubtedly important as a mode of knowledge production, it has far-reaching implications. Most significant is the disparity between the act of existing/existence – particularly as it relates to differential human states of being (race, gender, sexuality, etc.) – and predominant paradigms of epistemological operation. In this talk, Ramon Amaro discusses the domain of AI as an arrangement of axiomatic simplicity that, in its present form, diminishes the variant domains of psychological and physical reality. He argues for a return to the problematics of perception, as illustrated in debates between figuration and Black abstract art, to challenge the notion of an a priori analytics. Ultimately, he proposes a reorientation of the algorithmic as an ontological imperative that establishes the genesis of the human differential as an act of thought in itself.

Blackness at the Limits of Nothingness

I See That I See What You Don’t See, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, NL.

I See That I See What You Don’t See,

Responds to the Triennale’s general theme Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival. Designers, artists and researchers from the Netherlands and further afield present a layered picture of the current multispecies relationship with darkness, setting in motion imaginative critical responses to it. Their research, films, performances, sound and scent-scapes together form a viewing mechanism that evidences how current modes of understanding the environment are designed, and how they could therefore be redesigned.

Belief in AI Conference, Dubai Design Week. Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

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A talk at the first takeover of The National Maritime Museum's Atlantic Gallery: Slavery, Trade, Empire. The takeover, organised by The FXRUM, is an intervention to commemorate and rethink the legacy of Black Atlantic history and culture. ‘The Joy in the Punch’ refers to the experience of having to interrogate structures of oppression and the need to simultaneously punch through its limits.

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Public Design Symposium, Royal Academy of Arts (KABK), The Hague.

Governments and law enforcement are increasingly using technology and algorithms to predict where and when illegal activities are likely to occur. The fast-paced implementation of these predictive systems has them silently entering the public realm without discussion of their implications and adverse effects; solidifying structural inequality, creating new geographies of violence and dimensions of exclusion.

To address these matters and further questions of organising public safety and security in the age of big data, the students and staff of the master Non-Linear Narrative of the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague have organised this symposium, bringing together in conversation a diversity of professional perspectives, including philosophers, academics, designers, and information technology experts.

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This one day conference on race and surveillance will explore the way in which race is produced and formed by contemporary surveillance practices and techniques. Racialised differences are reproduced and rearticulated in the use of new surveillance methods, most clearly in terms of pre-crime practices and mechanisms. There has been strong and public resistance to the phenomenon of normalised and blanket surveillance since Edward Snowden's revelations about the practices of the National Security Agency (NSA) in the US. However, scholarly scrutiny of the differential material and discursive effects of surveillance is urgently needed. Contemporary practices of surveillance are based on long histories of inventing 'other races' and the observation and control of minoritised 'communities' in the colonies and imperial centres. Understanding contemporary surveillance practices demands understanding their origins in and ongoing connection to colonial histories. Important scholarly interventions on the intersection between race and surveillance exist in the US (Safiya Umoja Noble 2018; Simone Browne 2015; Arun Kundnani and Deepa Kumar 2015). However, the conjunction between race and surveillance is under-researched in Britain and Europe, and this conference will take steps to remedying this.

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FutureFest, NESTA, London.

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Movement And Framing (Or Grief And The Performance of Black Death),’ Critical Photography, Hochschule Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf.

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Visualising 4 Sainst in 3 Acts’, The Photographer’s Gallery, London.

Join visual artist Heather Agyepong, curators Patricia Allmer and John Sears and critical theorist Ramon Amaro for an afternoon of discussion exploring the themes, photographic dimensions and contemporary understandings of 4 Saints in 3 Acts - A Snapshot of the American Avant-garde.

Exhibition curators Patricia Allmer and John Sears focus on the relationship of photography to the conception, representation, performance, and contemporary dissemination especially in Harlem, of the opera Four Saints in Three Acts; Ramon Amaro, Lecturer at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths University of London, will consider the role of the machinic body and the use of visual aesthetics in black performance; and photographer Heather Agyepong presents her own work and approach, while also giving a personal response to the show.

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A short talk presented as part of After Work: Life, Labour and Automation, a symposium exploring work and resistance through and against technology.

“We misconstrue machine learning as being powered by data, when in fact machine learning makes use of data to produce within techno-social system…we can’t understand machine learning in isolation of the black female form. In other words, in order to understand automation and capital we must return to the racialized and gendered conception of what it means to be a body itself.”

The event took place at University of West London. It was organised by the Gender, Technology and Work research cluster at UWL, in collaboration with Autonomy, a thinktank focused on issues around the crisis of work, and wrkwrkwrk, an interdisciplinary feminist study group.

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Coastal University, USA.

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The Only Path to Tomorrow is a symposium convened by Zach Blas. Artists and scholars Ramon Amaro, Erika Balsom, Matthew Fuller, Elena Gorfinkel, Lawrence Lek and Ana TeixeiraPinto will discuss themes of the exhibition in relation to their own research, ranging from smart drug trends to contemporary manifestations of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism; from futures of artificial intelligence to transparent architecture in Silicon Valley; from modes of minoritarian techo-resistance to aesthetic strategies in queer cinema. Nootropics will be served.

'A throw of the dice will never abolish chance' was an exhibition at Banner Repeater in Sept/Nov 2016 that acted as a moving configuration that materialised in several forms throughout the exhibition period. It took Stéphane Mallarmé’s text “Un coup de dès jamais n’abolira le hasard” - a throw of the dice will never abolish chance - as a site to consider new ways of thinking through the centuries old puzzle of code, numbers and language. Material articulations, sited in the project space as parts of a puzzle, developed through the Thinking through the Block workshops and associated talks, and developed as a digital artefact that can be found at x-fx.org, that includes text, audio, and visual data, inscribed, ascribed, and described through the block.   For more information see here.

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Machine learning and the politics of data with Ramon Amaro

​Ramon Amaro will be talking through calculus as a key moment in our cultural understanding of data, leading to further discussion of ethics in the application of various mathematical models in our data driven society. There is a growing gap between the generation of datasets and our understanding of its potential uses. Data informs the conditions and long standing interests by which our knowledges about social situations are understood, as Oscar Gandy (2009) suggests: ‘most public decisions these days are made on the basis of some analysis of data’.

Ethically, the pervasiveness of data-driven devices and technologies aide in the delay of social and policy decisions about the usefulness of generated information, in favour of incomplete understandings of how learning and prediction methods can and do offer answers to social and political problems. These problems extend across a wide range of concerns, from accurate predictions of weapons targets and haptic responses to more mobile-friendly search engine results. Nonetheless, they are, by the very process of their design, fallible to social consequences that are most frequently articulated in forms of biases, segregations and other social restrictions. These concerns are particularly vulnerable if sufficient attentions are not given to ethical issues surrounding machine learning activities. That the answers to these concerns are found in profiling and prediction models, and often themselves initiate political, industry and social actions without specific aim, speaks to the continuation of an intensity to categorise social information and social agents into consistencies of performance-based assessments. These logic are founded in partial ethical debates that necessitate further considerations of the social, technical and political outcomes that inform the relationship between human and machines, where the most prevalent context in which we find ourselves in engagement with the machine is perhaps also the most taken for granted.

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Art:Work, Tate Modern, London.

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Blockchain and the General Problem of Protocological Control,’ DAOWO, Goethe Institut.

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Fanon Now, Tate Modern

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Decolonising STEM, Cambridge University.

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Leibniz and contemporary calculation,’ European Media Arts Festival, Osnabrück, Germany.

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FINDING HUMAN GHOSTS IN ALGORITHMS – PANEL DISCUSSION:

An exploration of the human ‘ghosts’ that are present in the mechanisms of artificial intelligence and machine learning that increasingly permeate everyday life. From Google’s ‘Deep Dream’ system, the complex analytics of the Amazon Echo, to the near-ubiquity of Cloud computing, we rely increasingly on systems which are hidden from us, both in their physical location and in how they function.

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Goldsmiths University

NRW-Forum, Hogeshule, Dusseldorf.

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Race and machine learning: On the blackness of black bodies and the illumination of color,’

Lecture given as part of the Uncertain Archives: Error symposium.

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Department of Arts and Cultural Studies,

University of Copenhagen.

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‍Lecture at a one day workshop organised by Luciana Parisi & Susan Schuppli

This one-day workshop aims to discuss the possibilities of thinking the political with and through machines. Whilst debates about the political implications of computation have focused on the data-driven governance of risk, less has been said about how to use the logic of prediction of machines, and how to re-invent a cybernetic politics outside the model of the network. Since the paradoxical strategies of visibility and secrecy, inclusion and exclusion seem weakened by an ever invasive and rampant state of control, this workshop aims to ask questions about how to counter-act these strategies.

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Hackers & Designers Summer Talks

#Neoliberation - The Self in the Era of New Media, Goldsmiths, University of London.

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fig-2 LUNÄ Talks: Uncertainty Scenarios w/ Artist Marjolijn Dijkman, Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London.

‍Uncertainty Scenarios is a collective experimental research project that explores the ways people throughout history have tried to speculate, predict and anticipate the future and different attitudes that go along with this. The project creates a common ground for a group of artists that all share interest in the concerns of the project and aims to establish a context for the development of new works. Together we reflect on possible consequences of current global socio-political or ecological issues and question our position as artists towards these. Uncertainty Scenarios tries to become an artistic tool to grasp the ‘futurity’ that is already, and increasingly, a part of our present.

Collectively we research for instance notions of speculation, methodologies used to predict the future, strategic thinking and scenario planning, risk and crisis management, divination and spiritual forecasts, Big Data, artificial intelligence or science fiction. How do these phenomena affect our thinking, behaviour and acting? What operations are we dealing with when we speak about speculation? How have technologies, like for instance computer modelling and calculating, affected our thinking about the future?

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Radical Ecologies Conference
Goldsmiths, University of London

Colossal data and Black futures,’ Impakt Festival, Utrecht, NL.

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Goldsmiths, University of London