[Commlist] Study-in on AI + Race + Art

Excited to announce that applications are now open for the ‘Study-in on 
AI + Race + Art’ in Melbourne on 18 October, 2023!

We invite writers, researchers, activists, artists and others together 
for a day of speculative thinking, talking, listening and 
experimentation on the topic of AI, race, and art. Hosted by the ADM+S 
with the VCA Centre of Visual Art (CoVA) and Art & Australia.

This is a free event with limited bursaries available to assist those 
who need to travel, have caring responsibilities, or would otherwise not 
be able to attend without financial assistance

Places are limited and participants are expected to attend all sessions. 
Participants will be selected via a short EoI process. *Deadline is 
Friday 8 September, midnight*.

Featured artists/speakers include: André Dao, Hoang Tran Nguyen, Jasmin 
Pfefferkorn, Thao Phan, Snack Syndicate (Andrew Brooks + Astrid 
Lorange), Tom Smith, Joel Spring, and more to be announced!

Full details below. Please share widely among your networks.

+++

*Time & Location:*
—Saturday 14 October 2023, 10am-6.00pm
—The Stables, VCA Southbank

*Curated by:*
Thao Phan (Monash), Andrew Brooks (UNSW), and Joel Stern (RMIT)

*Details on how to apply visit:*
https://www.artandaustralia.com/58_1/p143/study-in-on-ai-race-art 
<https://www.artandaustralia.com/58_1/p143/study-in-on-ai-race-art>

*About the event:*
What is study? For Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, study is a form of 
sociality. It is a meeting with, a brushing against, a bumping up of 
people, texts, ideas and things. It is the creation of a mutual and 
unpayable debt; a debt that is 'without count, without interest, without 
repayment.' As Moten states:

    study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking
    around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some
    irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of
    speculative practice.


This event is an exercise in precisely this kind of practice. It invites 
writers, researchers, activists, artists and others together for a day 
of speculative thinking, talking, listening and experimentation on the 
topic of AI, race, and art.

Terms like ‘AI’ are already associated with speculation—speculative 
fictions, speculative profits, speculative job losses, speculative risks 
and harms. Art also finds value in its connection to the 
speculative—speculative practice, speculative experiments, speculative 
funding, speculative futures. And critical work on race also 
productively turns to speculation when the empirical facts of inequity 
and injustice fail to create social change—speculative world-making and 
speculative methods to realise racial justice.

This event combines these different strands of speculation, holding 
together disparate threads that may gesture to abstract and 
indeterminate futures but are all irreducibly historical, political, and 
situated. It focuses on AI, race and art because these are topics that 
need to be studied, that must be studied because they have implications 
on such things as subjectivity, politics, inequality, and aesthetics. It 
takes the form of a ‘Study-in’, that is, a temporary school that will 
interrogate AI and race, developing new methods and approaches to study 
that draw from and feed into artistic methods and strategies. It begins 
from the proposition that the challenge of understanding race in the 
contemporary moment requires responses that are equal parts creative, 
critical, technical, and collective.

Through the process of collective study, the event will also build what 
might be called a speculative curriculum. Here, we take the traces of 
what Harney and Moten describe as the 'empty shell of what used to be 
called education' to cobble together a resource that can exceed the time 
and place of the ‘Study-in’ as an event and can be used by ourselves and 
others as an occasion for future study.

The event is motivated by questions such as:

  * How are bodies classified, recognised, and operationalised by
    Artifical Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) systems that
    are situated within colonial and imperial histories and contexts?
  * How are group-based differentials—such as race, gender,
    sexuality—shaped by data-driven technologies and AI systems?
  * How do these technologies move us beyond understanding race and
    gender as either purely biological or purely cultural?
  * And how might contemporary artistic practice help us to experiment,
    challenge, trouble, blow apart, and piece back together
    entanglements with technology, embodiment, and difference?

The Study-in is a day interrogating these questions and is curated by 
Thao Phan, Andrew Brooks, and Joel Stern in collaboration with CoVA, Art 
+ Australia, and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated 
Decision-Making & Society (ADM+S).

*Applications close:*
Friday 8 September, 2023, midnight.*
*
*For more information or to apply, visit: *
https://www.artandaustralia.com/58_1/p143/study-in-on-ai-race-art
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