Counting to 4: 0, 1, 2, 3 – Data Collection as Art Practice & Protest
SPACE Mare Street
Fri 6 - Sun 8 Oct 2017
Tickets available here
*discount available
Session 1: Architecting Data
Fri 6 Oct, 6.30 – 8.30pm workshop
£5
Session 2: Archiving, Collecting & Questioning Data
Sat 7 Oct, 12.30 – 2pm Pot lunch
2 – 5pm workshop
£7
Session 3: Data as Documentation / Data as Presentation
Sun 8 Oct, 1 – 5pm workshop
£7
Join artist and researcher Caroline Sinders for a 3-day workshop exploring how machine learning and data collection can be used as a form of protest and as creative practice. Combining lectures, machine learning analytics, design thinking iterations and interventions, each session will investigate varying methods of creating a feminist data set. Exploring its potential to disrupt larger systems by generating new forms agency, the series asks: can data collection itself function as an artwork? Can it act as a form of protest?
The creation of this feminist data set will act as a means to combat bias and introduce the possibility of data collection as a feminist practice, aiming to produce a slice of data to intervene in larger civic and private networks. Increasingly moving towards design, the series explores how interfaces can be agents of change within machine learning systems that are utilized by the public and private sectors of our daily lives.
What does a feminist data set look like when collaboratively made? How can we think of interfaces as active agents within systems? Participants will be invited to bring digital content such as images, gifs, videos, sound, music and texts, which they feel is feminist in nature, to feed into the data set, which teaches an AI system to recognise such data (examples: The Feminine Mystique, Beyonce’s Lemonade, “I Want a Dyke for President”, the Cyborg Feminist Manifesto, etc.). This process raises questions concerning qualitative data collection and requires the group to reflect on categories supposed to capture feminism.
Elements of this series will be recorded and made publicly available.
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Caroline Sinders is a machine learning designer/user, researcher and artist. For the past few years, she has been focusing on the intersections of natural language processing, artificial intelligence, abuse, online harassment and politics in digital, as well as conversational spaces. Caroline is a designer and researcher at the Wikimedia Foundation and a Creative Dissent fellow with YBCA. Previously, she was an Open Lab fellow with BuzzFeed and Eyebeam. She holds a Masters from New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program from New York University.
Further reading
Dear Elon
Machine Learning and the Complexities of Human Emotions (soon to be published by Tactical Tech)