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SUMMARY:reVisions: Decoding Technological Bias
DESCRIPTION:Join City Lights\, the Goethe-Institut San Francisco\, and Gray Area for reVisions\, a week-long festival exploring how technological bias shapes our cultural realities. \nOur trust in mediated experiences has never been lower. Governed by algorithms that perpetuate the biases and weaknesses of their developers\, our cultural consumption is increasingly shaped by undetectable forces that determine our reality. Images play an important role here: fake photos and videos created with deep neural networks threaten privacy\, democracy\, and national security. Vision recognition systems skew gender\, race\, and class differences and become vehicles of discrimination. Underdeveloped AI models misrepresent the health disparities faced by minority populations. \nHow can we illuminate the algorithmic bias embedded within technology and counter the perpetuation of bias? What innovative approaches can we develop to strengthen inclusion\, diversity\, and sustainability in technology? \nThis festival brings a network of luminaries together to share new perspectives and rewrite new visions advocating for justice and reclaiming power. \nThe festival is part of the project IMAGE + BIAS that critically engages with the cultural realities being increasingly determined by imperceptible technologies. \nSpeakers: \n• Jillian York\n• Maureen Webb\n• Kalindi Vora and Neda Atanasoski\n• Ryan Milner and Whitney Phillips\n• Jer Thorp and Romi Ron Morrison \n\nWorkshops: \n• Understanding AI Data Bias Workshop\n• BYOW Workshop: Build Your Own Words to Resist Algorithmic Censorship\n• Meme Tactics Workshop \nAll events are free but require registration. Links are posted below each event description. \n\n  \nSPEAKER SCHEDULE \n  \nThursday June 10\, 2021 \nSession 1 \n12:00 pm Pacific / 3:00 pm Eastern \nAgainst Technosolutionism! Why We Can’t Regulate Our Way Out Of This Mess \nwith Jillian York \n   \nThe same radical technologies that helped give rise the social and political movements of 2010-12 later enabled a rise in disinformation\, propaganda\, and the promotion of other harms. Today\, our societies are grappling to find solutions\, but looking in all the wrong places. \nJillian C. York is International Activism Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation\, EFF. She is also a founding member of the feminist collective\, Deep Lab. She has been covering questions of  surveillance and freedom since the 2000s. She was named by Foreign Policy as one of the top 100 intellectuals on social media. She has written for the Guardian\, Al Jazeera and Foreign Policy. Verso Books recently released her new book Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech under Surveillance Capitalism. She is based in Berlin. \nClick the (RSVP LINK) on the Gray Area website to reserve your place in the virtual hall. \n  \nFriday\, June 11\, 2021 \nSession 2 \n12:00 pm Pacific / 3:00 pm Eastern \nCoding Democracy – How Hackers Are Disrupting Power\, Surveillance\, and Authoritarianism \nwith Maureen Webb \n   \nHackers have a bad reputation\, as shady deployers of bots and destroyers of infrastructure. Maureen Webb would like to offer another view. Hackers\, she argues\, can be vital disruptors. Hacking is becoming a practice\, an ethos\, and a metaphor for a new wave of activism in which ordinary citizens are inventing new forms of distributed\, decentralized democracy for a digital era. Confronted with concentrations of power\, mass surveillance\, and authoritarianism enabled by new technology\, the hacking movement is trying to “build out” democracy into cyberspace. \nMaureen Webb is a human rights lawyer and activist. She has spoken extensively on post-September 11 security and human rights issues\, most recently testifying before the House and Senate Committees reviewing the Canadian Anti-terrorism Act. In 2001\, Webb was a Fellow at the Human Rights Institute at Columbia University in New York. A litigator for some of the first constitutional cases heard under Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms\, including the landmark freedom of association case\, “Lavigne\, “and a case challenging the powers of Canada’s newly instituted spy agency\, CSIS\, she sits as co-chair of the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group. She is also the Coordinator for Security and Human Rights issues for Lawyers’ Rights Watch Canada. She is the author of Illusions of Security: Global Surveillance and Democracy in the Post-9/11 World published by City Lights Books and has taught national security law as an Adjunct Professor at the University of British Columbia. \nClick the (RSVP LINK) on the Gray Area website to reserve your place in the virtual hall. \n  \nSession 3 \n3:00 pm Pacific / 6:00 pm Eastern \nSurrogate Futures: Technology\, Race\, and the Human \nwith Kalindi Vora and Neda Atanasoski \n     \nIn this talk\, Kalindi Vora and Neda Atanasoski consider how the surrogate effect of technology within technoliberalism\, as they describe it in their book\, Surrogate Humanity: Race\, Robots and the Politics of Technological Futures (2019)\, comes to bear on recent discussions around technological bias. Assessing how technological design is central to envisioning and shaping different potential futures\, they emphasize the importance of thinking beyond bias if we are to understand how racial capitalism undergirds technological design. They also explore radical design politics that disrupt more mainstream uses and visions of technological value. \nNeda Atanasoski is Professor of Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California\, Santa Cruz\, and author of Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity. \nKalindi Vora is Professor of Gender\, Sexuality\, and Women’s Studies at the University of California\, Davis\, and author of Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor. \nClick the (RSVP LINK) on the Gray Area website to reserve your place in the virtual hall. \n  \nSaturday\, June 12\, 2021 \nSession 4 \n12:00 pm Pacific / 3:00 pm Eastern \nYou Are Here: A Field Guide \nwith Ryan Milner and Whitney Phillips \n     \nOur media environment is in crisis. Polarization is rampant. Polluted information floods social media. Even our best efforts to help clean up can backfire\, sending toxins roaring across the landscape. In You Are Here\, Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner offer strategies for navigating increasingly treacherous information flows. Using ecological metaphors\, they emphasize how our individual me is entwined within a much larger we\, and how everyone fits within an ever-shifting network map. \nWhitney Phillips is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University and the author of This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture (MIT Press). \nRyan M. Milner is Associate Professor of Communication at the College of Charleston and author of The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media (MIT Press). \nClick the (RSVP LINK) on the Gray Area website to reserve your place in the virtual hall. \n  \nSession 5 \n3:00 pm Pacific / 6:00 p.m. \nLiving in Data \nwith Jer Thorp and Romi Ron Morrison \n     \nTo live in data in the twenty-first century is to be incessantly extracted from\, classified and categorized\, statisti-fied\, sold\, and surveilled. Data—our data—is mined and processed for profit\, power\, and political gain. In Living in Data\, Thorp asks a crucial question of our time: How do we stop passively inhabiting data\, and instead become active citizens of it? \nJer Thorp is an artist\, a writer\, and a teacher. He was the first data artist in residence at The New York Times\, he is a National Geographic Explorer\, and he served as the innovator in residence at the Library of Congress in 2017 and 2018. He lives under the Manhattan Bridge with his family and his awesome dog\, Trapper John\, MD. Living in Data is his first book. \nRomi Ron Morrison is a Black queer non-binary artist\, researcher\, and educator. Their work investigates the personal\, political\, ideological\, and spatial boundaries of race\, ethics\, and social infrastructure within digital technologies. Using maps\, data\, sound\, performance\, and video\, their installations center Black Feminist technologies that challenge the demands of an increasingly quantified world—reducing land into property\, people into digits\, and knowledge into data. \nClick the (RSVP LINK) on the Gray Area website to reserve your place in the virtual hall. \n  \nWorkshop Schedule \n  \nWednesday\, June 16\, 2021\, 10am – 1pm Pacific / 1pm – 4pm Eastern \nUnderstanding AI Data Bias \nInstructors: Paul Bethge\, Ralph Eger\, Yannick Hofmann\, & Jana Müller \nIn this workshop\, participants will be introduced to the basics of Deep Learning and explore the topic of data bias. Together\, the implications of this technology will be explored using generative neural networks in the visual media domain. \nCoordinated by The Intelligent Museum \n \nThe Intelligent Museum is a practice-based research and development project at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and the German Museum\, with the aim of connecting the museum with current AI technologies\, making it a place of experience and experimentation\, a social space where art\, science\, technology and public discourse come together. \n  \nThursday\, June 17\, 2021\, 10:00 am – 12:00 pm Pacific / 1:00 pm – 3:00 pm Eastern \nBYOW Workshop: Build Your Own Words to Resist Algorithmic Censorship \nInstructors: Xiaowei Wang\, Qianqian Ye \n   \nTo enroll click the (ENROLLMENT LINK) on the Gray Area website. \nOur capacity for change is shaped by our capacity for language: new phrases\, words\, revolution are created by our ability to imagine new worlds and vocabularies. From hashtags and political slogans\, words serve as reminders and provocations of where we’ve been and where we are headed. \nYet online\, words are not just expressions — words are now a form of data. “The systemic manipulation and monetization of digitized language is a threat to the security and stability of modern society. The very words we use to communicate\, learn\, debate\, and critique have become compromised by opaque algorithmic organisation and optimisation\, and the market-driven profits of private companies such as Google. We might therefore ask ourselves\, just how resilient and secure is language in the digital age?” writes researcher Pip Thornton. Whether in the US\, in China\, globally\, language online has become the medium in which activism arises. Language has also become a form of data\, ready to be co-opted\, used to create machine learning systems for profit\, such as words for training data that form AI models that can “write”. Words have also become an arena for automated censorship and moderation. In China\, automated censorship has led to a surge of creativity as online netizens scramble to “fool the machine”\, through creative use of homophones to images and new characters that bypass OCR (optical character recognition). \nWriting has long been a form of dissent and provocation. Words can destroy worlds or create new worlds. Our new languages will be prismatic in nature\, subject to the multiple\, relational and transnational ways of expression. \nIn this workshop\, we’ll use the Hanzimaker and other parts of the Algorithmic Censorship Toolkit by Future of Memory to experiment with creating new words\, phrases and vocabularies to document the past and think through the future. These new hybrid characters\, a mash of multiple languages\, just as diasporic as their creators will escape classification and recognition by automated systems. We see these characters as a form of visual poetry.\nAs Audre Lorde wrote\, “Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundation for a future of change\, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.” \nWhat words will we be left with to describe the past? What words will build our future? What is the new vocabulary we need for different kinds of revolution? \nXiaowei Wang is an artist\, coder and a writer. The creative director at Logic magazine\, their work encompasses community-based projects on technology\, ecology\, and education. Their projects have been finalists for the Index Design Awards and featured by the New York Times\, the BBC\, CNN\, VICE\, and elsewhere. \nQianqian Ye is an artist\, educator and organizer based in Los Angeles. She currently teaches at USC Media Arts + Practice and works as a p5.js co-lead at Processing Foundation. She was born and raised in China and moved to the US in 2012. Trained as an architect\, she explores the complex interaction between digital\, architectural\, and social spaces. \n  \nFriday\, June 18\, 2021\, 10:00 am – 1:00 pm Pacific / 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm Eastern \nMeme Tactics Workshop \nInstructors: Josue Chavez\, Kira Simon-Kennedy \n   \nTo enroll click the (ENROLLMENT LINK) on the Gray Area website. \nMemes make us laugh\, and make a message catch on. Best of all\, people can remix them and pass them on. We need all the tools we can get to negotiate power and assert presence. Meme Tactics is a session to share strategies to harness the humorous power of memes for movements. We’ll share examples of dances\, symbols\, zines and patches from Nicaragua\, India\, mainland China\, and beyond. You’ll leave with a set of tactics specific to amplify your own messages. \nJosue Chavez researches media\, translation and labor in China and Central America. He is the co-curator of Meme Tactics\, and his critical writing has been featured in Ada: A Journal of Gender\, New Media and Technology. He is a Ph.D. student in the Hispanic Studies department at Penn. \nKira Simon-Kennedy helps creative people do impactful and interesting things as the co-founder & director of China Residencies\, a co-founder of Rivet\, and an independent film producer. She likes writing guides\, redistributing resources\, and curating meme tactics. \n\n\nSponsored by the City Lights Foundation
URL:https://litseen.com/event/revisions-decoding-technological-bias/
LOCATION:CA
CATEGORIES:Virtual
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210613T130000
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SUMMARY:VIRTUAL: Omnidawn Spring Book Launch
DESCRIPTION:Booksmith and The Bindery are pleased to host Omnidawn Publishing for their seasonal launch of new titles\, for which each author will be reading from their work. Be the first to own these new treasures: \n100 Words by Damon Potter & Truong Tran \nBoyish by Brody Parrish Craig (winner of the Omnidawn Chapbook contest) \nLife in a Field by Katie Peterson (winner of the Omnidawn Open Book contest) \nLuminaires by Kristin Keane (winner of the Omnidawn Fabulist Fiction contest) \nTropical Lung exi(s)t(s) by Roberto Harrison \nThis event is free and all ages\, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers. \nAbout 100 Words by Damon Potter & Truong Tran \nWritten as a conversation engaged over the course of 100 words. It is an exchange of ideas\, dialogues\, burdens and ideals between someone Brown and someone White. It is an attempt by one to put the weight down and another’s willingness to pick it up. It is a private conversation made public. It is an exchange\, a negotiation\, discoveries. I did not know this about myself. You crossed the street or was it I? We walk and this weight\, we are still carrying it together. \nTruong Tran was born in Saigon\, Vietnam. He is the author of five previous collections of poetry\, The Book of Perceptions\, Placing the Accents\, Dust and Conscience\, Within The Margins\, and Four Letter Words. He also authored the children’s book\, Going Home Coming Home\, an artist monograph\, I Meant To Say Please Past the Sugar. His poems have been translated into Spanish\, French and Dutch. He is the recipient of The Poetry Center Prize\, The Fund For Poetry Grant\, The California Arts Council Grant and numerous San Francisco Arts Commission Grants. He lives in San Francisco and currently teaches at Mills College\, Oakland. \nDamon Potter lives and works in San Francisco. Poems have previously published in Elderly\, and Mirage #4/Period[ical]. \nTo have 100 Words sent to your door\, order here. \nAbout Boyish by Brody Parrish Craig \nBoyish engages what once thought impossible: a reconciliation of southern and queer identities\, of upbringing\, rebellion\, and revival. The coming to Jesus moments of looking back\, of liberation & reckoning. Each page exterior & interior revolutions. To carve space between. To cut-up the absence. To find oneself carried over graveled creekside into the first mouth’s babble. As much subconscious as embodied desire\, change holds within the white space and the formal play—language twisting the unspeakable alongside dense sonnets\, a thicket of warmth & dissonance that holds a mirror up to puddled overpass & river. The landscapes of city’s dystopia meeting the queer pastoral\, where conservation often means what must burn down. \nOriginally from Louisiana\, Brody Parrish Craig is a poet & tranarchist who currently lives in the Ozarks. They are an educator and creator of TWANG\, a regional creative project for TGNC folks in the South & Midwest US. BPC’s poetry has appeared in TYPO\, EOAGH\, Gigantic Sequins & Crab Fat Magazine\, amongst others. They can often be found by the creek. \nTo have Boyish sent to your door\, order here. \nAbout Life in a Field by Katie Peterson \nLife in a Field is a comedy about climate change. In the story\, a girl and a donkey become friends. Then\, they decide to marry time. A lyric fable\, Life in a Field intersperses slow-moving\, cinematic paragraphs in image-driven\, sensual prose with three folios of images by the photographer Young Suh. Introspection\, wish\, dream\, and memory take on the character of events. A narrative voice combines candor with distance\, attempting to find a path through our daily and familiar strife\, towards what remains of beauty and pleasure. In clear\, exacting sentences\, Life in a Field attempts\, against all evidence\, to reverse our accelerating destruction of the natural world\, reminding us of “the cold clarity we need to continue on this earth.” \nKatie Peterson is the author of four previous collections of poetry\, including A Piece of Good News. Her third collection\, The Accounts\, won the Rilke Prize from the University of North Texas. She is Professor and Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of California at Davis\, where she directs the M.F.A. program in Creative Writing. She lives in Berkeley with her husband\, Young Suh\, and their daughter Emily. \nTo have Life in a Field sent to your door\, order here. \nAbout Luminaires by Kristin Keane \nAgnes has been drifting away from herself. People look through her\, her husband doesn’t understand her and lately\, she’s begun losing the sensations in her body. When a tube of shoplifted lipstick awakens her back to life\, an impulse for stealing emerges that leads her to a court-ordered service at a camp for grieving children. Hopeful the time there will help make the stealing stop\, when the spirits of the campers’ parents realize Agnes can act as a conduit to their children through their things\, she has to navigate using her compulsion to either feed herself or to help the bereaved. Luminaries is about the things we take and about the things that are taken from us. It asks what it means to exist in lives filled with loss\, to reach for the things we hope balm us\, and the risks we’re willing to take to stymie yearning—both in our material lives and in the ones we pass through. \nKristin Keane‘s work has appeared with the New England Review\, The Normal School\, Electric Literature and elsewhere. She is a doctoral fellow at Stanford University and lives in San Francisco. More of her work can be found at thisisnotreallyhere.space. \nTo have Luminaires sent to your door\, order here. \nAbout Tropical Lung exi(s)t(s) by Roberto Harrison \nThese are writings and drawings from and to a new homeland\, a new homeland of Panamá that can be transmitted through the quantum martyrs beyond life and death\, and/or a new homeland of the Tecumseh Republic\, where technology grows to be necessary in understanding the ancient as well as then becoming erased and transcended by a now ever present electronic circle. It is a book brought close to the earth in its symbolic springs\, to the light filled mystery that began with countering disassociation and by repairing a devastating explosion of interior structures necessary to being a person in the most foundational ways. It is where the screen removes itself by song as we move toward kinship beyond color mark. \nRoberto Harrison‘s poetry books include Yaviza (Atelos\, 2017)\, Bridge of the World (Litmus Press\, 2017)\, culebra (Green Lantern Press\, 2016)\, bicycle (Noemi Press\, 2015)\, Counter Daemons (Litmus Press\, 2006)\, Os (subpress\, 2006)\, as well as many chapbooks. With Andrew Levy\, Roberto edited the poetry journal Crayon from 1997 to 2008. He is also the editor of Bronze Skull Press which has published over 20 chapbooks\, including the work of many Midwestern poets. Most recently Roberto served as a co-editor for the Resist Much/Obey Little : Inaugural Poems to the Resistance anthology. He was the Milwaukee Poet Laureate for 2017-2019 and is also a visual artist. He lives in Milwaukee with his wife the poet Brenda Cárdenas. \nTo have Tropical Lung exi(s)t(s) to your door\, order here.
URL:https://litseen.com/event/virtual-omnidawn-spring-book-launch/
LOCATION:CA
CATEGORIES:Free,Virtual
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