Decolonizing the Machine: Race, Gender and Disability in Robots and Algorithmic Art

This paper calls attention to critical race theory, critical disability studies, decolonial theory and their relevance to the study of robotic art and performances that utilise algorithms and other forms of computation. Our purpose is to uncover the veiled links between racial, gendered, and ableist practices that inform theory and practice in media art and performance, and to combat the governing codes that construct – and continue to normalize – practices of dehumanizing exclusions. While robots and cyborgs have the potential to figure posthuman forms of subjectivation, in practice they often reinforce human-machine, self-other, or abled-disabled binaries and gloss over the racist and dehumanizing exclusions that uphold neoliberal forms of power and Western conceptions of the human. Our aim is that this track, and the papers and discussions that follow, will highlight mechanisms for meaningful intervention and instigate critical reflection within media art theory to make visible how artworks and technologies continue to encode colonial hierarchies.

Content

Author and article information

Contributors

Boris Abramovic

Grisha Coleman

Marco Donnarumma

Elizabeth Jochum

Christina Schoux Casey

Conference

Publication date: September 2021

Publication date (Print): September 2021

Pages: 3-13

Affiliations

[0001]University of Vienna

Vienna, Austria

[0002]Arizona State University

Arizona, USA

[0003]Academy for Theatre and Digitality

Dortmund, Germany

[0004]Aalborg University

Aalborg, Denmark

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/POM2021.1

SO-VID: cb2118ec-eff3-4025-b940-90f324cb1adc

License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: Proceedings of Politics of the Machines - Rogue Research 2021

Conference acronym: POM 2021

Conference number: 3

Conference location: Berlin, Germany

Conference date: September 14-17, 2021

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: debate and devise concepts and practices that seek to critically question and unravel novel modes of science

History

Product

1477-9358 BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/POM2021.1

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

REFERENCES

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A. Birhane and O. Guest, (2021) Towards Decolonising Computational Sciences. Kvinder Køn & Forskning, (1), pp.60–73.
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R. Braidotti (2013) Posthuman Humanities. European Educational Research Journal, 12(1), pp. 1–20.
Coded Bias. 2020. [film] Directed by S. Kantayya. 7th Empire Media..
W. Chun (2021) Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
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M. Donnarumma (2020) Across Bodily and Disciplinary Borders. Performance Research, 25(4), pp. 36–44.
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H. Spillers (1987) Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book. Diacritics 17(2): 65–81.
L. Suchman (2018) Strategic Humanism. In Humanism: The Second Annual Debate of Anthropological Keywords. Ed. Carole McGranahan.
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A. Weheliye (2002) “Feenin”: Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music. Social Text 71, 20(2), pp. 21–47.
S. Wynter (2003) Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), pp.257–337.

Comments

Comment on this article

[1] R. Benjamin (2019a.) Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Medford, MA: Polity.

[2] R. Benjamin (2019b) Assessing Risk, Automating Racism. Science 366(6464): 421–22.

[3] A. Birhane (2021) Algorithmic Injustice: A Relational Ethics Approach. Patterns 2(2): 100205.

[4] A. Birhane and O. Guest, (2021) Towards Decolonising Computational Sciences. Kvinder Køn & Forskning, (1), pp.60–73.

[5] G. Bowker and S. Leigh Star, (1999) Sorting Things out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

[6] M. Broussard (2018) Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

[7] J. Buolamwini (2016). “InCoding: In the Beginning was the Coded Gaze.” http://medium.com/mit-media-lab/incoding-in-the beginning-4e2a5c51a45d

[8] J. Buolamwini and T. Gebru (2018) Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification. In: 1st Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency. [online] PMLR, pp.77–91. Available:<https://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a.html>

[9] R. Braidotti (2013) Posthuman Humanities. European Educational Research Journal, 12(1), pp. 1–20.

[10] Coded Bias. 2020. [film] Directed by S. Kantayya. 7th Empire Media..

[11] W. Chun (2021) Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

[12] W. Chun (2012) Race and/as Technology in Race After The Internet, ed. Lisa Nakamura and Peter A. Chow-White

[13] W. Chun (2009) Introduction: Race and/as Technology; or, How to Do Things to Race. Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 24(1): 7–35.

[14] L. Chude-Sokei. (2015) The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

[15] G. Coleman and T. Defrantz (2019) Reach, Robot: AfroFuturist Technologies. In: H. Gunkel and k. lynch, ed., We Travel the Space Ways. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, pp. 53–68.

[16] N. Couldry and U. Mejias (2019a) The costs of connection: How data is colonizing human life and appropriating it for capitalism. Stanford University Press

[17] N. Couldry and U. Mejias (2019b) Data colonialism: Rethinking big data’s relation to the contemporary subject. Television & New Media 20(4):336–349

[18] M. Donnarumma (2020) Across Bodily and Disciplinary Borders. Performance Research, 25(4), pp. 36–44.

[19] S. Goering and E. Klein (2020) Neurotechnolgis and Justice By, With, and For Disabled. The OXford Handbook of Philosophy and Disability. pp. 616–631.

[20] K. Gray (2015) Race, gender, & virtual inequality: Exploring the liberatory potential of Black cyberfeminist theory. In R. Lind (Ed.), Produsing Theory in a Digital World 2.0: The Intersection of Audiences and Production in Contemporary Theory (Vol. 2) (pp. 175–192). New York: Peter Lang.

[21] R. Grosfoguel (2013) The Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, 11(1), pp. 73–91.

[22] D. F. Harrell (2013) Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression. MIT Press.

[23] D. Haraway (1991) A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In: D. Haraway, ed., Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. London: Free Association Books, pp. 149–182.

[24] M. Hall (2020) Second Thoughts on Enhancement and Disability. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Disability. pp. 633–647.

[25] N. K. Hayles (1999) How We Became Posthuman. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.

[26] C. Hill (2021) Survival Practice Through Hood Feminism, Negritude, and Poetics. In Architecture and Culture, Volume 9. pp. 238–248.

[27] b. hooks (2000) Feminist theory: From margin to center. London, England: Pluto Press.

[28] b. hooks (2015). Black Looks: Race and Representation. New York: Routledge.

[29] B. Kolko, L. Nakamura and G. Rodman eds. (2000) Race in Cyberspace. New York: Routledge.

[30] A. Lorde (1984) Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley, Calif: Crossing Press.

[31] S. Lynch (2021) Peter Norvig: Today’s Most Pressing Questions in AI Are Human-Centered. Stanford HAI, [online] Available at: <https://hai.stanford.edu/news/peter-norvig-todays-most-pressing-questions-ai-are-human-centered>.

[32] S. Mohamed, M-T. Png, and W. Isaac (2020) Decolonial AI: Decolonial Theory as Sociotechnical Foresight in Artificial Intelligence. Philosophy & Technology 33(4): 659–84.

[33] S. Noble (2018) Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: New York University Press.

[34] C. O’Neil (2016) Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. First edition. New York: Crown.

[35] M. T. Nguyen, & T. L. N. Tu (Eds.). (2007). Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America. Duke UniversityPress. http://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1131dq9

[36] J. Rajko (2021) Techno-Neoliberalism’s Body: Dance(r) Labor in Computing Research and Race as Always Already Additive.

[37] J. Rhee (2018) The Robotic Imaginary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press..

[38] M. Shildrick (2012) Critical Disability Studies. In: N. Watson, A. Roulstone and C. Thomas, ed., Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 30–41.

[39] M. Shildrick (2013) Re-imagining Embodiment. Somatechnics 3.2 pp. 270–286.

[40] K. Spiel (2021) The Bodies of TEI – Investigating Norms and Assumptions in the Design of Embodied Interaction. TEI’21 Proceedings of the International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction.

[41] H. Spillers (1987) Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book. Diacritics 17(2): 65–81.

[42] L. Suchman (2018) Strategic Humanism. In Humanism: The Second Annual Debate of Anthropological Keywords. Ed. Carole McGranahan.

[43] A. Weheliye (2008) After Man. American Literary History, 20(1/2), pp. 321–336.

[44] A. Weheliye (2002) “Feenin”: Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music. Social Text 71, 20(2), pp. 21–47.

[45] S. Wynter (2003) Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), pp.257–337.

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