This proposal is for an Experimental Session at AOIR 2023 that will be led by a hybrid collective of scholars and practitioners (some are one or the other or both) including digital artists, ethnographers, technologists, activists, hackers, and makers. We are Argentinian, British, and Mexican working across those countries the US and beyond. Some of us work at Higher Education Institutes and/or run civic technology spaces inside and outside of these institutions. Over the last 3-years we have been working together to think about the relationship between digital technologies and resistance—whether that is thinking about digital representations of gender inequities and violence (Ricaurte 2019, Benjamin 2019); who makes (Suchman 2007), has access to or agency over digital technology (Siles et al 2021, Matzner 2019); how to build more equitable technologies (Gray & Witt 2021, Davis et al. 2021) or how to layer on to existing infrastructures (D’Ignacio & Klein 2020). A central theme of this work has been how technologies and algorithms are felt at the site of the body, as lived, embodied, ‘convivial’ and what this means for decisions and decision making.
We propose a 2-hour workshop that will first explore algorithms through the body, drawing on experiments from our collaborations and our collective work in order to explore bodies not only as lived, embodied and affective, but also as gendered, raced, located: this exploration will involve movement, sound and playful engagement with algorithmic concepts. From this we will enter into a guided conversation as to how these algorithms emerge in digital culture and through infrastructures and systems (ML). We develop from this discussion to work in small groups to produce visual, sonic and tactile responses through practice led and participatory methods. These explorations and responses will be live documented through sound, video and photography and the material outcomes displayed through the remainder of the conference as an exhibition provisionally titled Algorithmic Resistance, Tactics and the Body.
The workshop and materials will be in English and Spanish. This proposal was originally written in English for the purpose of the word count, but its corresponding Spanish version is attached.
Benjamin, R. (2019) Race After Technology. Polity. London
Davis, Jenny, L.,Williams, Apryl, Yang, Michael W. (2021) ‘Algorithmic reparation’, Big Data & Society, pp. 1–12. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211044808.
D’Ignazio, C. and Klein, L. F. 2020. Data Feminism. Cambridge MA. MIT Press.
Gray, Joanne E. and Witt, Alice (2021) ‘A Feminist Data Ethics of Care Framework for Machine Learning: The what, why, who and how’, First Monday, 26(12). Available at: https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/11833/10528?inline=1#author.
Matzner, T. 2019. ‘The Human Is Dead – Long Live the Algorithm! Human- Algorithmic Ensembles and Liberal Subjectivity’ Theory, Culture and Society 36(2), 123-144
Ricaurte, P. 2019. ‘Data Epistemologies: The Coloniality of Power, and Resistance’ Television and New Media 20(4): 350-365
Siles, Ignacio, Gómez Cruz, Edgar, Ricaurte, Paula (2021) ‘Toward a popular theory of algorithms’, Popular Communication The International Journal of Media and Culture, online first, pp. 1–10. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2022.2103140.
Suchman, L. 2007. Agencies in Technology Design: Feminist Reconfigurations. Unpublished Manuscript.
