Poetics of Information, Friday, 11/16, at NYU

The Jerry H. Labowitz Theatre for the Performing Arts
Nov 16, 2018, 9:30am – 6:00pm

See the website listing

The Poetics of Information is a one-day symposium bringing together writers, artists, scholars, and critics to consider the place of information as an aesthetic, conceptual, and creative force in contemporary culture. Topics to be addressed include vastness and repetition as aesthetic principles, algorithms and the creation and consumption of music, conceptual writers in their engagement with information, and the place of computation in literary studies and creation. Organized around a series of interdisciplinary discussion panels, the symposium includes prominent writers, conceptual artists, photographers, poets, critics, and scholars. These include Craig Dworkin (University of Utah), Robert Fitterman (New York University), Emily Fuhrman (Columbia University), Trevor Laurence Jockims (New York University), Shiv Kotecha (New York University), Damon Krukowski (Artforum, Pitchfork), Shannon Mattern (The New School), Holly Melgard (New York City College of Technology), Nick Montfort (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Allison Parrish (New York University), Zabet Patterson (Stony Brook University), Liz Pelly (Baffler, Pitchfork), Ben Ratliff (New York University), Paul Stephens (Bard Prison Initiative), Dennis Tenen (Columbia University), David Turner (Penny Fractions, The New Yorker), and Penelope Umbrico (School of Visual Arts).

The Poetics of Information has been organized by Trevor Laurence Jockims (TLJ3@NYU.EDU) and is free and open to NYU students, faculty, and the general public.

Symposium Schedule

9:30-10:00 am Welcome

10:00-11:15 am Repetition and Vastness
Moderator: Trevor Laurence Jockims (New York University)
Panelists: Robert Fitterman (New York University), Zabet Patterson (Stony Brook University), and Penelope Umbrico (School of Visual Arts)

11:30 am-12:45 pm Music and Algorithms
Moderator: Ben Ratliff (New York University)
Panelists: Damon Krukowski (Artforum, Pitchfork); Liz Pelly (Baffler, Pitchfork), David Turner (Penny Fractions, The New Yorker)

1:00-2:00 pm Lunch Break

2:00-3:15 pm Poetics and Informatics
Panelists: Shiv Kotecha (New York University), Holly Melgard (New York City College of Technology), Nick Montfort (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Paul Stephens (Bard Prison Initiative)

3:30-4:45 pm Poetic Computing
Panelists: Emily Fuhrman (Columbia University), Shannon Mattern (The New School), Allison Parrish (New York University); and Dennis Tenen (Columbia University)

5:00-6:00 pm Closing Lecture and Reading
Craig Dworkin (University of Utah)

Everything Is Connected: Art and Conspiracy @ the Met Breuer

@ Met Breuer through January 6, 2019

See the museum’s website

Gallery Talk Tuesday October 30, 12:30-1:30pm

For the last fifty years, artists have explored the hidden operations of power and the symbiotic suspicion between the government and its citizens that haunts Western democracies. Everything Is Connected: Art and Conspiracy is the first major exhibition to tackle this perennially provocative topic. It traces the simultaneous development of two kinds of art about conspiracy.

The first half of the exhibition comprises works by artists who hew strictly to the public record, uncovering hidden webs of deceit—from the shell corporations used by New York’s largest private landlord, interconnected networks encompassing politicians, businessmen, and arms dealers. In the second part, other artists dive headlong into the fever dreams of the disaffected, creating fantastical works that nevertheless uncover uncomfortable truths in an age of information overload and weakened trust in institutions.

Featuring seventy works by thirty artists in media ranging from painting and sculpture to photography, video, and installation art, from 1969 to 2016, Everything Is Connected: Art and Conspiracy presents an alternate history of postwar and contemporary art that is also an archaeology of our troubled times.

Graduate journal call for submissions

Hi everyone,
The graduate journal at my department at the University of Amsterdam is publishing a series of short articles or ‘insights’ on infrastructure by graduate students on their website. I talked to the web editor and he’s super interested in receiving submissions from the students in this class. Maybe you want to submit your presentation papers? The series is scheduled for publication across the first weeks of the new year. It coincides with a seminar at the University of Amsterdam called Repairing Infrastructures (http://www.cities.humanities.uva.nl/news/repairing-infrastructures/) but I believe the specific framing of the series depends on the submission they receive.
I can confirm that the website’s editorial team is very talented and smart and will generously spend time working with you on your text. This is the website https://soapboxjournal.com/
And some details:
Soapbox is looking for short research insights on a concise topic, question, or object related to (broken) infrastructures. For written submissions, the maximum word count is 1,500. We can include your submission in this series if it is received by November 20 but earlier submissions are appreciated.
We would also be very interested in hosting multimedia submissions or artworks: visual works, video, audio or otherwise.
Please email web@soapboxjournal.com to pitch submissions or for further information.

The Legacy Project: Archives for Black Lives @ Weeksville Heritage Center, 10/27

Saturday, October 27, 11am – 5pm
RSVP at Eventbrite

Rooted in perseverance and self-documentation, this hands-on, intergenerational event will gather Black memory workers from around the nation to explore the purpose and need of Archives for Black Lives.

Do you or your folks have a special or important physical photo of yourself, your family, or your community that you don’t know what to do with? Do you know the story or memory behind that photo?!

Well bring it with you to this event and we’ll give you some ideas and tips through our interactive storytelling and communal digitization workspaces. And we’ll share some resources for you to take home too!

A tour of the historic Hunterfly Road Houses and a fulfilling meal will also be offered during this free event.

Schedule:
11:00AM-12:00PM – Tour of Hunterfly Road Houses

12:15PM-1:45PM – Interactive Storytelling
Attendees will be given a brief overview of the oral history process and an opportunity to record short interviews based on the photographs they brought.

Obden Mondésir (Oral History Project Manager, WHC) will lead this workshop.

1:45PM-2:30PM – Lunch
A yummy Tantz Catering meal will be provided by The Legacy Project!

2:30PM-4:00PM – Communal Digitization
Attendees will be given a brief overview of best practices, and then time to put that information into action by using a scanning app to digitize their photos. They’ll also be emailed a link to their oral history recordings during this section.

Celeste Â-Re, MSLIS, PhD (Recorded Sound Library Technician, Library of Congress, National Audio-Visual Conservation Center) will lead this workshop.

4:00PM-5:00PM – Closing Dialogue
Obden Mondésir will provide opening remarks about The Legacy Project’s 2018 Public Training Workshop Series, and opportunities for the attendees to deepen their engagement beyond this event.

Holly Smith (College Archivist, Spelman College) and Zakiya Collier (Oral History Intern, Weeksville Heritage Center) will lead us in a discussion on community archives and Archives for Black Lives.

Politics of Sound: Listening to the Archive @ Interference Archive, 10/25

Thursday, October 25, 7pm @ Interference Archive

IA’s Announcement

Interference Archive presents a panel discussion that brings together a group of archivists, oral historians, librarians, and others working with collections of sound. They work in a range of disciplines–from poetry to oral history–all informed by a political approach to sound. We’ll discuss the various ways archiving sound can be a political act, including how sound archives can support organizing work, and how sound collections can contribute to the creation of historical memory, broadening the range of stories that are part of our collective history.

Speakers include Natiba Guy-Clement, Special Collections Manager at the Brooklyn Public Library, home of the Civil Rights in Brooklyn Oral History Collection; Daniel Horowitz, poet who uses sound archives in his work; Samara Smith, Associate Professor at SUNY, who documented the sounds of Occupy Wall Street; and Mario Alvarez and Alissa Funderbunk, creators of Columbia Life Histories, a series of oral history interviews with graduate students at Columbia University.

Analia Saban: Punched Card @ Tanya Bonakdar, through October 18

Through October 18 / gallery website

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is very pleased to present its third solo exhibition with Analia Saban, Punched Card, on view from September 6 through October 18. Throughout the past decade, Saban has developed a dynamic practice that at once investigates and subverts the fundamental elements of artmaking, blurring the lines between what constitutes painting, sculpture, and everyday object. Integrating conceptual depth with a poetic formal sensibility, innovative technical processes and wry wit, Saban’s latest body of work examines the transition and contrasts between analog and digital worlds. Literally weaving together content and form, the artist continues to explore how artmaking materials have shaped the history of art, and further, the role of technology in shaping our culture. The title of the exhibition, Punched Card, refers to both analog and digital methods of information storage. Based on a binary system, punched cards were used to program the first automated looms, much like the 0s and 1s that form the digital coding language of today.

RFP for Creative Residency at Olin College

More info on Olin’s website

Olin College of Engineering is seeking applicants for its creative residency program, an initiative that’s part of Sketch Model, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to bring artists and other creative practitioners to Olin’s campus to awaken the political and cultural contexts for technology. We’re seeking individuals or collectives whose work is significantly housed in the arts and humanities and whose interests might intersect in provocative and convivial ways with a small undergraduate college where all students major in engineering. The residency is a one-year opportunity for creative practitioners to carry out independent projects, collaborative engagement with students and faculty, and campus-wide events. Practitioners can come from the fine arts, design and architecture, craft, music, theatrical or dance performance, film, writing, new media, and the many hybrid forms of socially engaged and durational practices in contemporary global culture. Women and historically underrepresented communities are especially encouraged to apply. We’re calling for applications for our 2019-20 academic year. Deadline for applications is December 1 at midnight.

More information:
Olin College was established to re-invent engineering education. We welcomed our first class of students in 2002. A small-scale “lab school” with a large impact, Olin is an innovative leader in transformative higher education, welcoming weekly visitors to its campus from all over the world—thus far, over 800 visits from 55 countries since the school was founded. Our curriculum emphasizes human-centered design, real-world collaborations, and co-constructed pedagogies that partner students with faculty for authentic learning. Our presence in the Boston area connects our work to likeminded leaders in higher education, including a formal and active partnership with Wellesley and Babson Colleges. Olin operates free of departments, tenure structure, and traditional disciplinary divisions, and our tiny scale allows for an unusual amount of freedom and genuine community for its 350 undergraduates.

While the majority of our faculty come from fields of engineering and the sciences, our faculty also include scholars with expertise in anthropology, history, psychology, the fine arts, musical performance, design, and more. All students at Olin major in engineering, and they all take a minimum of 28 credit hours in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (AHS). Our AHS faculty create innovative, project-based, hands-on curricular experiences for our students that pose big questions; their courses are unlikely to be found in a course catalog anywhere else. But our community is hungry for additional and new engagements in the arts and humanities, and in summer 2017, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded Olin with a grant to fund three initiatives: hosting creative residents on campus, sending our students as summer interns to arts organizations nation-wide, and inviting arts and humanities scholars to campus to workshop their own STEM-arts curricula for their home institutions.

We call our residency program an opportunity for “Creatives-in-Reference”—a variation on the traditional residency model, one in which we imagine a resident with a more community-facing role. Where traditional residencies often emphasize individually driven, private practice, we’re interested in practitioners who can propose a project(s) that would be inherently social and collaborative: a figure who would be more available “in reference” than a lone creative. (See more information on the role in the Q & A below.)

Funding and Provisions:
The stipend for the year is $75,000. The creative will also have a $10,000 budget for events on campus. If desired, creatives will have access to all fabrication facilities: wood and metal shops, CNC machines, 3D printers, materials science labs, biology wet labs, sewing machines, screen printing tools, and more. Our campus was built in 2001 and is fully and meaningfully ADA compliant. Reach out with other questions you might have about access needs.

Requirements for application:
Submit your application, including links to work, CV, three references, and answers to three essay questions we’ve provided (and listed below).

Using no more than 2000 words, divided as you like:

How might you use a residency year at Olin? Show us the topics, themes, and possible artifacts or events or performances in a project you could pursue. We know these experiences would need to be crafted and emergent in real time! But give us an idea for a proposal that would look like a successful engagement. What might it look like, a prototype that’s being hatched? We know you have to squint a little to see the promise of an idea, but give us the contours, the questions, the energy of the possible in drawings, 3D models, narrative, video, or something else that makes sense for you.

How do you imagine the “in-reference” aspect of the work in your proposed project? This experience would simultaneously be for your independent work and for collaborations in the community. “In-reference” could mean lots of things, depending on the actors involved. How might you shape the definition of the role, when you consider both your own work in the future and the possible futures for engineering education?

What does the experience of your residency look like for a student? You might consider the experiences that you either did or did not have as a creative person in training: what worked and what didn’t? How might you sculpt conditions so that students have a point of entry to your work, and so that students have a way to ask themselves what might be a new path for their future in engineering?

Propose a Five-Minute Talk, Performance, or Reading for the Queens Museum’s “Convening on the Commons,” Oct 13

Held bi-annually since 2002, the Queens International highlights the artistic production of Queens in a major group exhibition. Now in its eighth iteration, Queens International 2018: Volumes, which opens on October 7th, includes 43 Queens-connected artists and collectives representing 15 neighborhoods and several generations, and for the first time, a partnership with the Queens Library. Participating artists’ works respond to sites throughout the entire museum and select Queens Library branches to question and expand systems of knowledge production.

On October 13th, the QI 2018 presents Convening on the Commons in the museum’s skylight and atrium galleries, two architectural spaces that house works responding to the notion of the agora, understood as a public space used variably as a site for assembly and as a marketplace.

Within this context, the QM welcomes proposals for SESSIONS participants. SESSIONS are broken down into thematically-organized discussion groups. Participants give 5-minute talks, performances, and/or readings focusing on the relationships and contradictions between the commons, publicness, and knowledge production. Discussion groups might include sessions on relationships between: the body and the natural or the built environment; technology and visions of collective memory; information and surveillance; property and resource dispersal.

Following SESSIONS, three guest speakers will offer brief lectures, followed by an open discussion between all participants and the audience.

This interdisciplinary event will engage thinkers from the fields of: art, critical theory, architecture & urbanism, performance studies, public policy, municipal law, literature, poetry, technology, education, and beyond.

Open Call: Past, present and future in the net art archive, Sept 17

via Rhizome

Building on the survey with ArtBase archive users we conducted earlier this year, we are organizing a follow-up hands-on workshop session for Rhizome community members based in/around NYC. This practical research session, led by our PhD researcher Lozana Rossenova, continues the commitment of our digital preservation program to consider the needs and requirements of our users and to factor them into the on-going process of re-developing our archive of net art.

This 3-hour workshop session will feature presentations on the current state of the archive, as well as demos of work-in-progress new interface prototypes. Through practical exercises, participants will be encouraged to think together through issues around the context, description and presentation of artworks in the archive. Participants will be able to learn more about how Rhizome is exploring the potential of linked data to support digital preservation for complex digital artworks, and will be able to test some of the archival interface tools we’re currently developing.

GIF by Ben Fino-Radin, source: http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/sep/20/artbase-update/

The workshop will take place on Monday, Sept. 24th from 10am-1pm. Breakfast and tea/coffee will be provided. Unfortunately, we are unable to offer compensation for travel expenses.

This workshop is aimed at anyone familiar with Rhizome’s archive and preservation programme, but anyone interested in digital art preservation in general, particularly artists, preservation professionals, or students are all welcome to attend. Places are limited, so if you’d like to attend please fill in this short form and we’ll get back to you to confirm your attendance.

This workshop is part of an ongoing joint research project between Rhizome and London South Bank University. Feel free to contact Lozana at lozana.rossenova@rhizome.org with any questions or concerns regarding user studies in the archive.

Field/Fair/Museum: A February Symposium on Anthropology, Media and Archives

Yes, this is well after our semester ends, but it looks fabulous:

Friday, February 15, 1:30 to 5:30pm
Bard Graduate Center, 38 West 86th St
Website / RSVP 

This symposium marks the opening of The Story Box, a BGC Focus Exhibition that examines the hidden histories and complex legacies of one of the most influential books in the field of anthropology: Franz Boas’s The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians (1897). The collaborative product of Boas’s own observations and extensive materials authored by his long-time Indigenous co-worker George Hunt, the text was the first systematic attempt to document all sociocultural, spiritual, and aesthetic aspects of a spectacular Native North American ceremonial structure. A pioneering achievement on many levels—not least in its use of “new” media for ethnographic representation—it was the immediate inspiration for subsequent books, images, and museum displays, and has been the subject of an ever-lengthening list of secondary literature.

Yet few readers realize the conditions under which the book was produced, which include the scramble for Northwest Coast collections, the Canadian prohibition of the potlatch, and the participation of Kwakwaka’wakw in the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. This exhibit and symposium contribute to a collaborative project to reassemble globally distributed collections and fragmented archives, illuminate the book’s history, and return long-dormant knowledge to the Indigenous families whose patrimony is represented in it. Speakers include project team members who will discuss the primary media utilized by Boas and Hunt (museum objects, texts, photographs, and wax cylinder recordings), the main sites for their ethnographic recording (fieldwork in British Columbia, the Chicago World’s Fair, and museums in North America and Europe), and the legacy of the book in Kwakwaka’wakw communities.

Speakers include:
Aaron Glass, Bard Graduate Center
Judith Berman, University of Victoria
Ira Jacknis, Hearst Museum, University of California Berkeley
Rainer Hatoum , Goethe University
Andy Everson, Artist and Community Researcher, Comox, BC
Corrine Hunt, Artist and Guest Exhibit Designer, Vancouver, BC
Keynote Discussant (TBD)

Image: Left: Chief making a speech at a potlatch, Fort Rupert, BC, 1894 (detail). Photograph by Oregon C. Hastings, courtesy American Museum of Natural History Library, 336116. Middle: Franz Boas posing as a Hamat’sa dancer, United States National Museum, Washington, DC, 1895 (detail). Courtesy National Anthropological Archives/Smithsonian Institution, 8300. Right: Xwani performing a dance at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, IL, 1893 (detail). Photograph by John H. Grabill, courtesy Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, 93-1-10 100266.1.37.

Symposium—Conserving Active Matter: History @ Bard Grad Center, November 1

November 1, 9:15am – 6:15pm
Bard Grad Center, 38 W 86th St
Website / RSVP

This event is part of “Conserving Active Matter: A Cultures of Conservation Research Project,” a collaboration between Bard Graduate Center, the Humboldt University (Berlin), and the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam). This initiative aims to bring new developments in materials science and new ways of thinking about matter to create new ways of thinking about the future of conservation. The project is articulated through semester-themed explorations along four axes: Indigenous ontologies (spring 2018), history (fall 2018), materials science (spring 2019), and philosophy (fall 2019).

The working group on “Active Matter and History” (Peter N. Miller, Ittai Weinryb) aims to contextualize the current interest in active matter lest we become too enamored of the present and too constrained by our own limited horizons. Probing the boundaries of dualistic thought, from Pre-Socratics to plastics, this workshop will help us understand exactly how we got to the point that the activity of organic matter had to be rediscovered at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Beyond genealogy, however, the recognition that conceptual mis-en-scène is one, long, historical artifact raises new possibilities for rethinking activity along the arc of all those other victims of dualization, such as the subject/object, archaic/modern, living/non-living, human/non-human, and West/Eastern dichotomies.

Panels on Magic, Buddhism, Subjectivities, Traditions, Modernism

True Lies, Deep Fakes: Platforms, Knowledge, and Alternative Communities @ New Museum, November 3

New Museum, 11/3, @ 3pm
$15 GA / $10 members
Website

It goes without saying that corporate platforms increasingly structure our reality and, in turn, our social and political lives. Within these platforms––and in the more remote nooks and crannies of the internet––new regimes of truth are being cemented as the old ones crumble. While this is just the nature of a centuries-old cycle of knowledge production and reification, new questions have arisen about how the internet’s infrastructure itself impacts these processes and how it might be harnessed for something other than “red-pilling,” or the indoctrination of users into the views of the violent alt-right.

In order to address these questions, True Lies, Deep Fakes brings together a group of artists, writers, and practitioners who explore platforms, the social dynamics they engender, and alternative models for community building and artistic production. How do new models for aggregating and distributing information generate new ontologies of truthmaking and community?

Against Forgetting: Archiving Dance, September 12, 6-8pm

SEP. 12 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Gibney, 280 Broadway
Entrance @ 53A Chambers
FREE

Website / RSVP 

Known as the most ephemeral art, dance is also intellectual thought, labor and creative achievement. How do we honor the legacy of dance, its pioneers and innovators? How do we tell the deeper stor(ies) of dance? Who does (or does not) get to shape and tell these stories? How do we preserve the record of dance as a touchstone for future artists and communities?

Faciliatator: Eva Yaa Asantewaa
Core Participants: Arlene Yu, Jill Williams, Paloma McGregor and Margit Edwards

Part of Gibney’s Center Line series.

Curated and hosted by Senior Curatorial Director, Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Center Line is a series highlighting issues in the dance community through monthly conversations (Long Tables) and experiential gatherings (Circling Back).

IMAGE: Carmen de Lavallade and Alvin Ailey at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in 1961. Credit John Lindquist/Harvard Theater Collection

Fall 2018 Speaker Series @ Columbia: “Oral History and the Future: Archives and Embodied Memory”

Website

Oral history is a conversation about the past that takes place in the present and is oriented towards the future. How is this future orientation made real?

Oral history as a research practice, particularly in the United States, has been defined by a focus on recording and archiving in institutional repositories. But people can be archives too, and oral history-telling practices more broadly often depend on embodied memory, on person-to-person transmission. And because people have been formally recording and archiving oral histories for over seventy years, we are now living in the futures imagined by earlier generations of oral historians. How do these voices from the past function in our present/their future? Looking at examples from digital archiving to indigenous oral history practices, in this series we will examine how the various ways that oral history is projected into the future work, and how they shape our practices as oral historians.

September 13, 2018, 6:10 – 7:30 PM
Pan Dulce: Breaking Bread with the Past
Maria Cotera

October 4, 2018, 6:10 – 7:30 PM
The Uses of Narrative in Organizing for Social Justice
Sujatha Fernandes

October 18, 2018, 6:10 – 7:30 PM
Confessions of an Accidental Oral Historian, Archivist, and Podcaster
Eric Marcus

November 1, 2018, 6:10 – 7:30 PM
Accelerating Change: Oral History, Innovation, and Impact
Doug Boyd

November 29, 2018, 6:10 – 7:30 PM
Words Transmitted; Worlds Apart
Fernanda Espinosa

Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art @ Whitney Museum, 9/28 – 4/14

Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018 establishes connections between works of art based on instructions, spanning over fifty years of conceptual, video, and computational art. The pieces in the exhibition are all “programmed” using instructions, sets of rules, and code, but they also address the use of programming in their creation. The exhibition links two strands of artistic exploration: the first examines the program as instructions, rules, and algorithms with a focus on conceptual art practices and their emphasis on ideas as the driving force behind the art; the second strand engages with the use of instructions and algorithms to manipulate the TV program, its apparatus, and signals or image sequences. Featuring works drawn from the Whitney’s collection, Programmed looks back at predecessors of computational art and shows how the ideas addressed in those earlier works have evolved in contemporary artistic practices. At a time when our world is increasingly driven by automated systems, Programmed traces how rules and instructions in art have both responded to and been shaped by technologies, resulting in profound changes to our image culture.

via Whitney Museum 

Cornell Tech Digital Life Seminar Series

Thursdays 12:30 to 2pm
Cornell Tech Campus, Roosevelt Island, Tata Innovation Center, Room 131

Website

Thursday 30 AUGUST | 2018
Jake Goldenfein | Digital Life Initiative, Cornell Tech
The Profiling Potential of Computer Vision

Abstract

Over the past decade, researchers have been inves­ti­gat­ing new tech­nolo­gies for cat­e­goris­ing people based on phys­i­cal attrib­utes alone. Unlike pro­fil­ing with behav­ioural data cre­ated by inter­act­ing with infor­ma­tional envi­ron­ments, these tech­nolo­gies record and mea­sure data from the ‘real world’ and use it to make a deci­sion about the​ ‘world state’ – in this case a judge­ment about a person. Auto­mated Per­son­al­ity Analy­sis and Auto­mated Per­son­al­ity Recog­ni­tion, for instance, are grow­ing sub-​dis­ci­plines of com­puter vision and computer listening. This family of tech­niques has been used to gen­er­ate per­son­al­ity pro­files, assess­ments of sex­u­al­ity, polit­i­cal orientation and crim­i­nal­ propensity using facial mor­pholo­gies and speech expres­sions alone. These pro­fil­ing sys­tems do not target the con­tent of images or speech, but measure and analyse para-visual and para-sonic information to train classifiers for revealing non-visual information like personal typologies and behavioural predictions.

While the knowl­edge claims of these pro­fil­ing tech­niques are often ten­ta­tive, they increas­ingly deploy a vari­ant of ​‘big data epis­te­mol­ogy’ suggesting there is more infor­ma­tion in a human face or in spoken sound than is acces­si­ble or com­pre­hen­si­ble to humans. This paper explores the bases of those claims and the sys­tems of mea­sure­ment that are deployed in com­puter vision and lis­ten­ing. It asks if there is some­thing new in this class of data science knowledge claim, and attempts to under­stand what it means to com­bine com­pu­ta­tional empiri­cism, sta­tis­ti­cal analy­ses, and prob­a­bilis­tic rep­re­sen­ta­tions to pro­duce knowl­edge about people. Finally, the paper explores possible mechanisms for contesting the emergence of computational empiricism as the dominant knowledge platform for understanding the world and people within it.


Thursday 06 SEPTEMBER | 2018
Glen Weyl | Microsoft Research
Data as Labor

Biography

Glen Weyl is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New York City and teaches economics at Princeton University. His work on political economy seeks to combine economics, law, technology, philosophy to design radically egalitarian and inclusive markets that can address large scale social problems. He has published his research in leading journals in economics, law and computer science and has taught at the University of Chicago and Yale. However, he has recently turned towards communicating with and building a movement among a broader public. This began with is book Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society joint with Eric Posner, but has continued in his work advising a wide range of start-ups developing Radical Markets ideas (especially in the blockchain space), helping organize a data labor movement, working with governments and political leaders around the world and collaborating with artists and other communicators to realize the true democratic potential of Radical Markets ideas.Glen is working to organize these strands into a coherent social movement through a variety of community-building activities and in particular is organizing a conference around Radical Markets, RadicalxChange, in March 2019.

Abstract

Weyl will discuss “Data as Labor” as a conceptual frame, a set of organizational principles and a social movement. He will argue that conceiving of data as labor can make significant progress in resolving a number of theoretical and social problems associated with the exploitation of data and its creators, including the privacy-ownership dialectic, the paltry share of value added paid to labor in the high tech sector and the problematics of platform size and power. Weyl will discuss how data as labor suggests the need for a new kind of organization (“mediators of individual data” or MIDs) analogous to labor unions that would act as fiduciaries and loci of collective bargaining to protect data creators and describe eight principles for a successful MID. He will describe recent progress in creating a data labor movement and briefly conclude by placing it in a broader context of the Radical Markets agenda he has been developing.


Thursday 27 SEPTEMBER | 2018
Francesca Rossi | IBM AI Ethics Global Leader

Respondent: Daniel P. Huttenlocher | Cornell Tech, Dean and Vice Provost

​Biography

Francesca Rossi is the IBM AI Ethics Global Leader, a distinguished research scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Centre, and a professor of computer science at the University of Padova, Italy. Francesca’s research interest focuses on artificial intelligence, specifically constraint reasoning, preferences, multi-agent systems, computational social choice, and collective decision making. She is also interested in ethical issues surrounding the development and behavior of AI systems, in particular for decision support systems for group decision making. A prolific author, Francesca has published over 190 scientific articles in both journals and conference proceedings as well as co-authoring A Short Introduction to Preferences: Between AI and Social Choice. She has edited 17 volumes, including conference proceedings, collections of contributions, special issues of journals, and The Handbook of Constraint Programming.

NY Art Book Fair, September 21-23

Printed Matter’s NY Art Book Fair (NYABF) is the leading international gathering for the distribution of artists’ books, celebrating the full breadth of the art publishing community. Free and open to the public, the event draws more than 35,000 individuals including book lovers, collectors, artists, and art world professionals each year. In 2018, the NYABF will host 365 exhibitors from around the world featuring a wide variety of works – from zines and artists’ books to antiquarian books and contemporary art editions. The NYABF offers countless opportunities to attend free programs including artist-led discussions, performances, interactive workshops, and curated exhibitions.

@ MoMA PS1

HOURS AND LOCATION
Preview Thursday, September 20, 6-9pm (Ticketed)
Friday, September 21, 1-7pm
Saturday, September 22, 11am-9pm
Sunday, September 23, 11am-7pm

Website