[Air-L] Applications open! Study-In on Race, AI, and Art in Australia, Melbourne October 18, 2023

[Thao Phan]

Hi AoIRists!

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.

All the best,
Thao Phan

+++
*Study-In on AI + Race + Art*

*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

*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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