Decolonising bots https://thursdaynight.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/activiteiten/decolonising-bots

[before talks start a video from a talk at eyeo festival (?), cultural appropriation]

Klaas Kuitenbrouwer

datafication of society. "it brings us to a strange place"

"the way we develop our tastes" 

Ramon Amaro (on-line, skype)

"i cannot be there" shows data in bag. volunteer his date. share the labor. 
stories that have come out: advanced neural networks -- determining sexual identity (Fag Face) 
.. puts cards with "My Gender" and "My Sexuality"

example: no amazon deliveries in black neighbourhoods. 

black women categorised as women (tags "animal spirit").

soap dispenser sensor does not detect black skin -- so brings own soap. "to be in line with the sensors that are".

... these are common experiences black bodies experience.

[Kittler 2003 quote?] Present and future behaviours. Certain groups and individuals have disappeared under data culture.
"Otherwise other" bodies (black, queer, ...) are made both super visible and super invisible

Black body as the error of the system, what is considered error is also a fantastic space of resistance. Control ... multiplying options to move. Decolonising is an option. Looking for a non-exploitative world.

What does it mean to look forward to such a world. Black representation and blackness vs. data culture.

[three US people on stage. interesting! Not true. one UK ;-)]

Legacy Russel

Algorithm as a metaphorical structure of society. 

starts with (video -- man (?) in blue sweatshirt marked 'lover' holds tablet (?) showing face. Sad song playing.
Sound: audio from after police shooting Philano Castile "please don't tell me my boyfriend is dead"

"they are killing us"

[situation with slides and keynote software ... audience giving instructions. audience: the tech guy is doing the right thing]

wandering. the ability to walk freely. quote Baudelaire
wilding. gang of youths, slang ... public threat

profiling. black lives matter is being surveyed. Black flaneur is often seen as wildering. Flaneur is white. 

picture of father hugged by her sister. 
explains as a photographer he was stopped and frisked. he was one week older than average black men when he died

futurity and blackness
has his own avatar -- digitlal man

E. Jane #mood -- safe and safely free. What can the internet do for the black flaneur?
Manifesto: not identity artist -- working on safety and security. needs utopian demands.
NOPE as an act of resistance 

kneeling sporters at national anthem. performing refusal.

twist: wilding as a revolutionary force. 

image of sky (image that goes with the audio played earlier)
facebook live stream was removed as "graphic content"

facebook as a ?? 

we must assert space in the digital. Future blackness. Resist via existence. Video: "pack power for my people"

RA: boiling point. success of people in digital culture is an anomaly -- also/even digital space a space of survival (hatespeech) reproduced on the internet.
algorithm produces space to move where the body can not. Could there be space for bodies of colour? A generative role?

LR: anomaly not a pejorative. People creating and recreating, [naming artists] New possibilities for where the body can go. 
glitch the system, reinvent it as our own material. 

RA: Can you elaborate on worldbuilding? Fragility of black body. Can you produce outside of the physical trauma. 

LR: Memory art. The things that happen, need not to be seen as imaginary, but imaginary is needed. Imaginary as a tool. Futurity. Not the same as fantasy. It is a survival tool, to rethink a space that fails us. Art can do that? Political discourse.

Audience: Intrigued by distinguishing fantasy -- imaginary.

LR: Blackness as a technology. Slavery and inventive means of surviving. Ability of making/keeping connections. Creating viral spaces. Technologies of resistance. 

Audience: Recording. She switches into journalism voice/gaze. 

LR: Great question. Black body becomes the technology. Technology taken from her. She becomes the vessel. Need to keep understanding how difficult it must have been to witness/report. We are able to walk out and watch the sky.

[Ramon introduces next speaker]

Florence Okoye

Works in natural history museum. How to encourage "engagement". Tech as a means of engagement. The age of the bot. 
IRC ... Eliza ... it is not a new and exciting thing, it has been there for a while.

trying to take on humanistic characteristic. The ability to lie. AI is super humanistic. Industries think of it as a way to make the interacting with tech more 'natural'. The intrepid cyborg must take care

service design as a critique (software as a critique)

problematic and humanistic 
feeding into our worst habits. addictive mentality.

mechanism of clickbait -- well-designed, so is that also is "good design"
paradigm of bettering your audience.

jokes with "never ask people what they want"

industry is super white-male. empathy a problem. 

uses 5 core principles of service design as entries to discuss decolonising opportunities
- use centred
- co-creative
- sequencing (tech is one thing in an ecology of many things)
- evidencing (showing what is going on)
- holistic (the entire environment needs to be considered)

centering the user at the heart of the design

tech and imperialism and colonialism

the algorithm/bot as a buzzworld (uncanny valley)

design as a skin on top on something that is already designed.
How can we apply the same principles to the algos themselves. 

graph of standard service iterative design process:

DEFINE - COLLECT - BRAINSTORM/ANALYZE - DEVELOP - FEEDBACK - IMPROVE

compares with software development:

REQUIREMENTS - DESIGN IMPLEMENTATION - INTEGRATION - OPERATION

where in these processes is the human considered?
these are simplistic process descriptions. 

RECURSIVE FUNCTION - STATEMENTS - CONDITION - REMAINING STATEMENTS - STOP

the algos we have follow a similar contradiction -- the solution is already there. A mockery of user centered design

how can we start to think to redesign the algo itself

digital colonialism. it is a reality.
methods: 

insistence on ...

astroblackness - incubator of bots. new ways of thinking the algo
example of black women 'recognized' as gorilla's

childlike status, machine learning as a small child.

breaking down of algorithmic culture. US surveillance. 

How do we design these bots, life and death

is critique all we can do?

what does TDD look like from an afrofuturist viewpoint?
how would an astroblack technologist interprest the agile methodology

computer scientists say ... it is trailing points ... 
role play? Birmingham open media

Racism in these technologies are a revelation of already existing ideas 

decolonise is to decentralise and distribute (Christina has pic of exact slogan!)

QUESTION

RA: as if algoritms are separate from the social. Rebuilding a design process that can consider. 
Cybernetics and presuming a contant. Failure of cybernetic. Inability to capture all. Producing your own forms of contingency. What can designers do? Overcoming the separation between human and technology.

FO: It is controversial, problem space of/between tech and humans. Designer becomes a moralist, and hypocritical. Design = capitalist. Designer should create a site of solidarity. Designer says NO. (NOPE?)
seeing potential for an interesting ... designer as a traitor, going from IBM to hackerspaces. Trojan horse. 
What are the social and economic structures in place

Audience: Interfaces have become "userfriendly". But how not to infantilize?

FO: Bot announcing their own limits. Dummness. The spinning wheel. Getting so used to things that we forget what it means. (ref. trauma, or interfaces). Complex systems science? Repeated. similar. but complicated processes.

Audience: as a user I become more and simple because of the way design keeps me out. Can you help me be less racist through design. 

FO: The eternal question is the money question. The service will have to be paid for.

LR: Maybe that is where art experiments come in (games). People are putting money into that. Fun politics. To finance it is less threatening. 

FO: Arts funded by Google.

LR: Radical artworks funded by rightwing fascists. look at the funding pages. Reality of art as a commodity. It might feel less scary. Trojan horse.

Klaas [hijacks last question]: Worldbuilding is a fantasy (??) "art as a critique of the present, design offers an alternative future" (??)

LR: Department of worldbuilding opened in California - so it is REAL. Art is useful. And not just fantasy, it moves beyond action.

FO: I agree! Critical design starts with making something that is not comfortable. Inconvenient products create futurity. The baby-radio: asking questions about gender, care, empathy ... 

[ENDING]






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From: Adrian Mackenzie, The production of prediction: What does machine learning want? (2015)

"This desire to predict desire has epistemic implications; it is power-saturated and also materializes in complex technological–cultural commodities that are beginning to stabilize in aggregate forms."

"while they classify in very different ways, they all assume that the world is made of things or events that fit in stable and distinct categories. Their capacity to classify depends on learning to recognize the differences between categories that themselves remain fixed."

"Even from the perspective of relatively straightforward political economy, the value of predictions differs according to the labour that makes them, and different predictive styles (probabilistic, information theoretical, decisionistic) entail different kinds of value."

"Ironically, generalization depends heavily on specificity, including many domain- or algorithmic-specific details that rarely surface in the romantic emplotments of machine-learning-based prediction as generalizing patterns in the data."

"This combination of indifference to actual differences and presumption of stable classifications is a distinctively problematic feature of machine learning."

"But what if the production of prediction changes the world that predictions inhabit?"

"Could the generalization of these techniques potentialize new forms of aggregate, new associations and combinations of collective life that are less targeted on who clicks what or who buys what? (...) is there also a trans-individual cooperative potential? The answer certainly does not lie in the potential of technologies such as machine learning to act autonomously. While powerfully equipped to model variations, they struggle to predict becomings, let alone change themselves. The effectiveness of machine learning in any setting depends on relatively stable forms. Variation fuels data mining, but change thwarts it."


































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