Jetsam – Acts of Queering AI

One Day Laboratory October 1 2024

Jetsam – Acts of Queering AI

*Organized by Annette Jael Lehmann, Ariadna Blanch López, Charlotte Hannah Peters, Giacomo Nanni, Suzan Hanow, Till Rückwart and in collaboration with: Circulating Narratives - Entangling Communities: Case Studies in Global Performance Art based at the Cluster of Excellence EXC 2020 “Temporal Communities”, Freie Universität Berlin. In collaboration with metaLAB (at) Harvard & FU Berlin and Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart.

October 1 2024
Berlin 10:00 am - 5:00 pm CET

Held at Institut für Theaterwissenschaft, Hörsaal
Grunewaldstr. 35
12165 Berlin

This collaborative One Day Laboratory Jetsam offers an art and practice-based exploration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the way it reflects and reproduces certain normative practices of gender and sexuality, to ultimately foster more diverse and radical entanglements with digital technologies.

From the backdrop of case studies in art, artistic research, technoscience studies and queer activism, Acts of Queering AI proposes blurring of boundaries between nature and culture, technology and biology, and the human and the non-human as fundamental intersectional power systems of difference. We collaboratively explore the relationship between queerness and AI from a perspective that posits data-visualization and queer knowledge design as central to understanding AI differently. In which ways can visualizations such as in avatars reframe the relationship between datafication and the queer body? Stressing the socially constructed nature of AI, the artist and researchers pose questions about the politics and ethics of machine embodiments and data imaginaries on the one hand, and about technical possibilities for a more-than-human production of social identities characterized by shifting diversity and multiplicity on the other, as they are mediated by and through digital interventions.

The Lab is a special stage for new, unexpected, and groundbreaking relationalities between human and non-human bodies (“biohacking”, “queering ‘trans-nature’”, “self-design sexes” etc.), and its ongoing transformation into a posthuman world from the perspectives of art, data-mappings and knowledge design.

Program

Schedule is in Central European Time (CET)/Berlin
Each presentation includes 15 minutes Q&A

• 10:00 | Annette Jael Lehmann & Jeffrey Schnapp: Welcome remarks

• 10:15 | Kim Albrecht & Annette Jael Lehmann: Introduction & Exploration of the Program

Dialogue I: Case Studies on Queering Decolonial AI

Moderator: Florian Conradi

• 10:30 | Nora Al Badri: Technoheritage and the post-truth museum: decolonizing collections as practice
  Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal: Does Size Matter?: On Scale and Foundation AI Models

• 12:00 | Lunch Break

Dialogue II: Case Studies on Biohacking and Self-Design Sexes.

Moderator: Aylin Tschoepe

• 13:00 | Lyndsey Walsh: Monstrous Mutabilities and Living Machines
  Follow-Up Conversation with Michelle Christensen

• 14:30 | Short Break

Dialogue III: Case Studies on Deep Fakes in AI.

Moderator: Dario Rodighiero

• 14:45 | Charmaine Poh: THE YOUNG BODY UNIVERSE
  Follow-Up Conversation with Anna-Catharina Gebbers

• 16:15 | Short Break

• 16:30 | Wrap-Up & Closing Remarks (Annette Jael Lehmann and Jeffrey Schnapp)