"The Chronicles of Xenosocialist AI”: Towards Feminist and Decolonial AI with Artistic Research and Creative Methods

Thursday 23 May, Winchester School of Art, Lecture Theatre B & Online

Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics research group hosts a workshop and a half-day informal symposium dedicated to the use of artistic research, science fiction, future studies and other creative methods in researching cultural approaches to AI and decolonial and feminist AI imaginaries.

11.00-13.00 - Workshop "Other Futures: Science Fiction Methods for Technopolitical Imagination”

This workshop is aimed at employing methods from science fiction writing, future studies and speculative design to engage in experimental ‘version-making’ and imaginaries of the future. It offers a series of collective exercises (that can be also retained as thinking tools) to engage with technopolitical visions of the future that go beyond binary options of utopia or dystopia, but rather towards complex and productive versions that can be tweaked, used in storytelling and theory-fiction or applied to alternative imaginaries of AI.

13.00-14.00 - Lunch

14.00-14.50 - Session 1, "The Chronicles of Xenosocialist AI" - Laura Trilla, Gustavo Collado, Mandus Ridefelt, Sasha Anikina, Nupur Doshi

"The Chronicles of Xenosocialist AI" is a collaborative world-building project aimed at imagining micropolitical narratives, visual cultures, non-state infrastructures and new relationalities of a potential xenosocialist AI (encountering the human-inhabited Earth) could be, drawing on science fiction methods and decolonial and feminist approaches. It was developed as a fictional radio station, prompt manifesto and mixed media installation in Medialab Matadero, Madrid.

15.00-16.00 - Session 2, Decolonial and Feminist AI Imaginaries: Francis Gene-Rowe, Mandus Ridefelt, Yadira Sanchez Benitez

Francis Gene-Rowe, Against Coercive Computation: Imagining Daoist AI

Mandus Ridefelt, Mutual Hearing Aid

Yadira Sanchez Benitez, Land based algorithmic ecologies

16.15-17.15 - Keynote by Maya Indira Ganesh "On the limits of knowing in AI times"

Dr Maya Indira Ganesh is a technology researcher and writer whose work investigates the social, cultural, and political implications of the 'becoming-human' of machines, and vice versa. Maya spent 15 years working at the intersection of gender justice, technology, and human rights with Indian and international NGOs.

Networking and drinks

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This event is organised by Dr Alexandra Anikina and Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics group (Department of Art and Media Technology, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton) and supported by Web Science Institute and Medialab Matadero, Madrid.

Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton combines expertise in web science, data science and artificial intelligence to study the relationship between society and the largest information system in history: the World Wide Web.

Medialab Matadero, formerly known as Medialab Prado, is a cultural space and citizen lab in Madrid (Spain). It was created by the Madrid City Council in 2000, growing since then into a leading center for citizen innovation. It follows a participatory approach, using collective intelligence methods (developed in living labs) and fast prototyping tools such as fab labs, to use and co-create digital commons.