This Global Arts + Humanities Society of Fellows’ series of lectures featured artists and scholars whose work foregrounded the ethical obligations arising from the simulation of human intelligence and increased surveillance.
DIGITAL DIALOGUE | “Feminist Methodologies for AI"
Neda Atanasoki (University of Maryland) and Jennifer Rhee (Virginia Commonwealth University)
Atanasoki and Rhee address “vital intelligences” — a counter to corporate imaginings of AI systems that claim to provide intimacy. Emphasizing affect, embodiment and more-than-human life, they explore feminist approaches to intelligence and the material conditions that make contemporary Al possible.
KEY TAKEAWAY: Intelligence is embodied, unruly and relational
“Artisinal Intelligences”
Katherine Behar (Baruch College)
Behar focused on basketry’s resistance to automation to underscore the value of what she calls “artisanal intelligences,” which she defines as forms of tacit knowledge that cannot easily be abstracted into algorithmic procedures. In the accompanying workshop participants reverse engineered baskets in order to learn patterns and the making gestures those patterns represent.
KEY TAKEAWAY: Tacit knowledge cannot be easily abstracted
“And Bells On: Sound and Surveillance”
Simone Browne (University of Texas-Austin)
Browne discussed apps accompanying home monitoring systems and the ways artists engage with the afterlives of surveillance technologies. She also discussed how these tools participate in broader systems of control, tracing the logics they inherited from slavery and policing while engaging the ways in which artistic interventions challenge the enduring legacies of these systems.
KEY TAKEAWAY: Artistic interventions challenge surveillance
“Becoming Auto”
Lauren Lee McCarthy (University of California)
McCarthy explored reciprocal risk taking and vulnerability in human engagement with AI technologies and prompted the audience to contemplate questions such as: Who builds these artificial systems? What values do they embody? Who is prioritized? In the midst of ‘always on’ networked interfaces, what does it mean to be truly present?
KEY TAKEAWAY: Algorithms shape intimacy, risk and presence
“Manufacturing Intelligence”
Dennis Yi Tenen (Columbia University)
Tenen traced how automated practices have shaped the history of writing and technology. For Tenen, writing technologies have long enabled humans to share and delegate cognition, and AI continues this tradition of collective intellectual work. From this view, generative models are not autonomous agents but participants in the historical legacy of distributed authorship.
KEY TAKEAWAY: Generative models are not autonomous agents
“Distant Viewing”
Lauren Tilton (University of Richmond)
Tilton addressed how AI is shifting the ways we view, and how we can use AI to analyze images in the humanities. Tilton’s transdisciplinary method of “distant viewing” introduced a reflexive framework for understanding computer vision as a way of circulating and producing knowledge and how algorithms are designed with certain ways of seeing.
KEY TAKEAWAY: Algorithms are designed with certain ways of seeing