Against the pace of infinite urgencies surrounding AI and gender inequality, deceleration is embraced to:
- read together slowly
- look at gender inequality & AI, while not reinforcing the binary
- engage in an intersectional analysis (Crenshaw)
- commit to inter/transdisciplinary approaches that do not seek to centre technology but rather situate and challenge it (ethos: Audre Lorde’s adage that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.)
- envision technology in its broadest and entangled sense as neither tool nor interface (Haraway).
- question how fairness and equality are defined and according to whose terms and conditions
- explore the possibilities of refusal – the right not to be datafied
- foster forms of fictioning that engage the speculative imagination to reach outside the restraints of wicked problems and prototype what might be otherwise
- share knowledge by generating a living glossary and bibliography of references (including forms of practices, texts and other resources), while resisting the calcification associated with required reading
- explore the idea of machine pedagogies versus machine learning in order to interrogate what is knowledge acquisition in this context
- search for and acknowledge our blind spots and biases as we move along
- read up to power up (Corita Kent)
- update and alter these aims in light of insights acquired as we move along
SLOW READERS are collectively pulled and guided by the negotiation of individual interests, fascinations, and disciplinary backgrounds. Research is emergent, transdisciplinary, and at times, rubbing against the grain of linear logic. Some of the reading methods employed are slow code reading, quilted or fragmented reading, adjacent reading, annotation as reading, divination reading, transcription as reading, reading aloud, reading through translation, reparative reading, dataset reading, reading in temporal drag etc. Rather than streamlining for clarity, SLOW READERS persistently move through and engage with the quagmire.
CURRENT SLOW READERS ARE:
Agathe Balayn is currently a PhD candidate in computer science at the Delft University of Technology, with a penchant for interdisciplinary research. She works on uncovering safety and discrimination harms that various artificial intelligence technologies might create, as she develops technical methods and structured processes to better understand how these technologies come to be and deploy. In the past, she has also explored the fields of assistive robotics and hate speech detection through research visits to different institutions.
Born in Buenos Aires in 1988, Sonia de Jager is currently a doctoral researcher at Erasmus University, writing a thesis about the philosophy of artificial intelligence. De Jager also works at the Willem de Kooning Academie as an art theory tutor and runs the yearly music and philosophy conference Regenerative Feedback.
Cristina Cochior (RO) is a researcher and designer focused on structures of knowledge co-production, politics of automation, archival representation, collective publishing and situated software practices. Her artistic research practice is embedded within the material conditions of knowledge organisation technologies. She graduated from the Piet Zwart Institute – Master Media Design and the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design – Visual Communication and she is part of the collective Varia in Rotterdam. http://randomiser.info/
Sieta van Horck (1992) is a project manager in the V2_ lab. Projects she guides include a wide range of artworks, hosting the Critical AI meetups, the Summer Sessions network for Talent Development and coordinating various art exhibitions. She is educated as a creative technologist and holds a BA in Digital Media and Culture and MSc in Media Technology. As an artist, her main interest lies in merging nature and technology. She uses technology as a language to explore, play and research the human connection with the natural world. Her work aims to explore intuitive embodied knowledge by using technology to make us feel more present and closer to our human senses.
Linda Wan Lee (b. Los Angeles) is an independent researcher and works at Willem de Kooning Academy and with the Rotterdam Arts & Sciences Lab. She is interested in the biopolitics of the built environment and human-machine friendships and feuds. She previously worked as an architect in New York City on various projects, including a masterplan for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, an urban pocket park, an outdoor gallery and screening venue, and several residential constructions. She studied art history and French & francophone studies at the University of California, Los Angeles and architecture at Yale University.
Danae Tapia, a working-class feminist writer, multimedia artist and technologist, is a lecturer of Hacking and Autonomous Practices at the Willem de Kooning Academy and the founder of The Digital Witchcraft Institute. In the past, she has worked as a project manager and researcher in digital justice organizations in Chile, Brazil, the US and The Netherlands
Noemi Biro is a designer and digital landscaper currently based in Rotterdam, NL. With a background in graphic design, she graduated from the Autonomous practice Digital Craft from Willem de Kooning Academy (Rotterdam, NL) in 2019. Through processes that guide the outcome and input that fuels the process, she works with participatory design and online platforms. Her artistic research focuses on movement and space in the context of Augmented Reality as an interactive installation piece and alternative web experiences. noemibiro.com
Anna Laura (aka SUKUBRATZ) is and audio-visual, multimedia artist and DJ based in Rotterdam [NL]. Coming from an artistic background based on the love for the artificial and radical visual art she also extends her practice towards the world of sonics. As an upcoming artist her musical roots are based on her Chilean heritage, but mixing it with club, and love for hardcore, tekno and sounds of the European scene. ‘As we live in an image-based society I find it crucial to critically question the inputs that surround us and that our eyes are subjected to. In my practice I strive to push the boundaries of the very definition of visual itself, and I do this by creating parallel micro-cosmos that exist purely in the ether or artificial reality.’
Born in Canada, Michelle Teran is an educator, artist, researcher and activist. She is practice-oriented Research Professor Social Practices at Willem de Kooning Academy. Her research areas encompass socially engaged and site-specific art, transmedia storytelling, speculative fiction, counter-cartographies, social movements, urbanism, feminist practices, and critical pedagogy. She completed her doctorate in artistic research at the Bergen Academy of Art and Design within the Norwegian Artistic Research Fellowship Programme. She is the winner of several awards, including the Transmediale Award, the Turku2011 Digital Media & Art Grand Prix Award, Prix Ars Electronica honorary mention and the Vida 8.0 Art & Artificial Life International Competition. http://www.ubermatic.org/
SLOW READING is initiated by Renée Turner as a part of her V2 Fellowship.