Democracy
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Elsa On The Moon
Mathieu Zurstrassen (BE)
Elsa on the Moon is a kinetic sculpture tribute to Elsa Von Freytag Loringhoven, eccentric baroness and contemporary of Marcel Duchamp; ambiguously attributed with the creation Fountain, in 1917. Or was it Louise Norton? The work consists of a robotic leg capped with a ceramic urinal. The device is balanced with counterweights through an extended aluminum arm.
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Political Atmosphere
Felix Lenz (AT)
“Political Atmosphere” is an experiential installation amplifying the invisible connections between flight turbulence, climate change and war. It consists of a data-driven mechanical siren and an ADS-B antenna, which allows for receiving, processing and visualizing the surrounding flight traffic. Each flight slowly accelerates the latent build-up of potential until a threshold is passed and a mechanism releases the siren.
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Nushin Isabelle Yazdani und Internet Teapot (Karla Zavala und Adriaan Odendaal): [d/r]econstructing AI - dreams of visionary fiction and zine-making
How to Become a High-Tech-Anti-Discrimination Activist Collective
With this workshop we investigate the structures behind algorithmic decision making systems, discuss why their design is normative, and how AI systems reinforce structural discrimination. We embark on a speculative journey and discuss how to design to create a more just world. Which artists inspire us? Which values are important to us? We want to collect our thoughts and creative outputs in a zine.
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LAB ON STAGE (Adriana Torres Topaga, Martyna Lorenc and Andrea Maria Handler): Phantom Data in our bodies and imagination
How to Become a High-Tech-Anti-Discrimination Activist Collective
This workshop undertakes a performing arts’ approach. Our departure is the embodiment of imagination and perceptual processes. With somatic exercises and performative games, we notice the data flowing in from our bodies: sensation, image, emotion or memory. Imagination has its own training dataset - therefore a specific priming/bias/imprint. We look for practices of becoming aware of HOW we imagine things and what escapes our field of attention.
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Astrid Mager und Hong Phuc Dang: How to create your own AI device with SUSI.AI - An Open Source Platform for Conversational Web
How to Become a High-Tech Anti-Discrimination Activist Collective
The workshop introduces SUSI components like SUSI’s technology stack, its wiki-like skill editor and hardware prototype; participants work together to create a simple bot, develop new skills and test them. A reflection on data bias and algorithmic discrimination invites to collectively think about creating non-discriminatory digital technologies.
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Doris Allhutter: “When I encountered discriminating IT-systems and did not want to take it anymore” - deconstructing affective entanglements in society-technology relations
How to Become a High-Tech Anti-Discrimination Activist Collective
This workshop uses the deconstructive method of mind scripting to understand the grip that even technologies that we reject may have on us. Using our own memories as an experimental resource we will explore how discrimination and privilege materialize in our practices. This aims at developing collective agency and activisms.
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Safiya Umoja Noble: Algorithms of Oppression - How Search Engines Reinforce Racism
How to Become a High-Tech Anti-Discrimination Activist Collective
The landscape of information is rapidly shifting as new demands are increasing investment in digital technologies. Yet, critical scholars continue to demonstrate how many technologies are shaped by and infused with values that are not impartial, disembodied, or lacking positionality. Technologies hold racial, gender, and class politics. In this talk, Dr. Safiya Noble will discuss her recent book, Algorithms of Oppression, and the impact of technology on the public.
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Lisa Nakamura: Estranging Digital Racial Terrorism After COVID
How to Become a High-Tech Anti-Discrimination Activist Collective
This talk argues that COVID-19 forced an accelerated migration to digital networks that exposed new audiences to traumatically racist digital events as well as new openings for critique and resistance.
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The Woman-Machine
le lieu unique (FR)
The Woman-Machine is a two-day event on the main stage of le lieu unique. In response to La Mettrie (and Kraftwerk) le lieu unique invites artists, scientists and performers to discuss the relationship between AIs and gender, robots and feminism, machine learning and the world after the pandemic.
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How to Become a High-Tech Anti-Discrimination Activist Collective
IFG-LIT (AT)
New technologies have penetrated all aspects of our lives and promise a wide range of improvements and efficiencies. Contrary to general perception, though, the algorithms on which these technologies are based are neither neutral nor do they treat everyone equally.
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Treeversity
Johann Höller (AT), Thomas Lorenz (AT), Florian Gruber (AT), Ursula Niederländer (AT), Tanja Illetits-Motta (AT), Raphael Blasi (AT), Andreas Rösch (IT), Stefan Küll (AT)
Treeversity focuses on the relation between Big Data and data visualization to convey complex information at a glance. A mirror of the university’s inner workings, diligently recording success, failure and evolution. A portrait of its life in the form of a tree. Courses, grades and exams become branches, creating many different trees. Fully grown or nascent, withering or growing erratically. Treeversity shows the university as a forest, providing a tool to analyze its mechanisms at the same time.
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Digital Government in a Box
LIT Law Lab, Johannes Kepler University (AT)
From the “transparent citizen” and “social scoring” to AI-supported truth finding in the courtroom and machine-generated administrative notices: the digitization of administration and jurisdiction has many facets. It requires not only a consideration of what is technically possible, but also of what is legally permissible and what is desired in terms of legal policy. Against this background, the LIT Law Lab has two installations dedicated to the legal framework conditions (fundamental rights and data protection), problems and proposed solutions for a digitized enforcement.
![](https://ars.electronica.art/keplersgardens/files/2020/08/KI-Wahrheitsmaschine@Shutterstock-300x150.jpg)
Al truth machine
LIT Law Lab, Johannes Kepler Universität (AT)
From the “transparent citizen” and ”social scoring” to AI-supported truth finding in the courtroom and machine-generated administrative notices: the digitization of administration and jurisdiction has many facets. It requires not only a consideration of what is technically possible, but also what is legally permissible and what is desired in terms of legal policy. Against this background, the LIT Law Lab has two installations dedicated to the legal framework conditions (fundamental rights and data protection), problems and proposed solutions for a digitized enforcement.
![](https://ars.electronica.art/keplersgardens/files/2020/08/50336701571_ed74be9903_o2-300x150.jpg)
Performance Workshop: Enacting Innovation
Judith Igelsböck (AT), Friedrich Kirschner (DE), Sarah Buser (CH), Mónica Rikić (ES), Leoni Voegelin (CH), Tomás Montes Massa (CL), Laura Zoelzer (DE)
Enacting Innovation is a participatory staging of the social fabric surrounding contemporary innovation practices. Participants will negotiate the roles and situations that are frequently encountered in innovation processes and act out conflicts with each other and the technical infrastructures typically employed within such contexts. The simulation is inspired by research on ‘innovation scripts’ – the recipes followed in dealing with the omnipresent pressure to prove innovative ability.
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Random Rhetoric
MADE Group (GR)
“Random Rhetoric“ refers to computerized practices in politics, which are carried out through computers under the norm that political ideas operate as an outcome of mechanized processes and statistics, aiming at the absolute persuasion, the seduction of the audience, allured from the representation of a machine mimicking a human being.
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The Step into Space Garden
Leiden University (NL)
The Step into Space Garden is a journey of discovery through the story of space and your part in it. It presents online and in person events bring together space sciences and arts, through exhibitions and participatory activities with a focus on projects by and for youth.