Politics of the Machine - Decolonizing the Machine

Hi all,

with Christina Shoux Casey (Aalborg University, DK), Grisha Coleman (Arizona State University, US),
and Elizabeth Jochum (Aalborg University, DK) I’m co-chairing a track at the Politics of Machine conference. The track, Decolonizing the Machine, aims to tackle issues of race, gender and disability as they relate to performing machines/technological bodies. I think this is relevant to the NIME community especially in light of the recent interest in related topics across the community.

I think it’s badly needed in media art and in hci, and it also helps my current research (I bring in the discourse on critical disability studies and critical embodiment studies in performance and music).

Please feel free to forward to anyone who might be interested. And obviously, if you feel any of your projects may be relevant, consider submitting. That would be awesome. I’m available for any question in relation to the track.

Deadline for abstracts is 1st March.

500 words.

Thank you,

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Details:

Track 01
Decolonizing the Machine

This track explores black feminist critiques of posthumanism in and through artistic practice and performance research that utilize robots, machine learning, and computation. While robots and cyborgs have potential to figure posthuman forms of subjectivations, in algorithmic societies they often reinforce human-machine, self-other, or abled-disabled binaries, and gloss over the racist and dehumanizing exclusions that uphold neoliberal forms of power and Western conceptions of the human. This track is designed to cultivate and expand upon recent critical race and disability scholarship to uncover how hierarchies are encoded through biased digital technologies that systematically harm persons of colour and elide people with disabilities.

We invite contributions that critically inquire issues of race, gender and disability as they relate to performing machines/technological bodies. We aim at diverse and inclusive scholarship and practice that emphasise decolonial thinking/making. In coordination with the POM theme ‘Rogue Research’, we encourage theory and research involving critical and experimental approaches.

Such inquiry might address topics such as:

– Race/gender/disability bias in robotic/cyborg art
– Algorithmic oppression in robotic/cyborg art, computational racialization
– Critical phenomenology and histories of race and technology in robotic/cyborg art
– Indigenous technologies/epistemologies in art and performance
– Black feminist theory, critical race studies, critical feminism, critical embodiment studies, disability studies, cybertheory, somatechnics, critical posthumanism

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