The Trouble with Visibility

Lecture by Ramon Amaro & performance by Tiara Roxanne
Moderation: Nelly Y. Pinkrah
Welcome: Clemens Apprich, Media Theory, University of Applied Arts

This event is part of the series Decolonizing Technology in cooperation with the department of Media Theory

Ramon Amaro will talk about his upcoming book The Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being. The book aims to introduce the history of statistical analysis and a knowledge of sociogenesis—a system of racism amenable to scientific explanation—into machine learning research as an act of impairing the racial ordering of the world.
While machine learning—computer programming designed for taxonomic patterning—provides useful insight into racism and racist behavior, a gap is present in the relationship between machine learning, the racial history of scientific explanation, and the Black lived experience.
–––
Tiara Roxanne work contends that AI is colonial in creation and nature, as its invention is founded on a settler colonial paradigm. In acknowledging this certainty, she states I cannot decolonize my body and performs as an incantation of survival and ancestral reconciliation. In performance, Roxanne is (dis)entangled within material and digital colonial borders of the past, present and future.
As part of an ongoing project entitled Red, through performance Tiara Roxanne will illustrate the relationship between Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Indigeneity.
By reinterpreting processes of colonial recovery through a performative and critical lens, Roxanne suggests that we will arrive at sovereign, Indigenous notions of digital borders, data colonialism and storytelling.