Participation: is limited, to join please send an email to info@varia.zone with [colonial infrastructures] in the subject by October 24th
This worksession intends to be a moment of collective learning, to make tangible invisible colonial mechanisms of hierarchy and oppression that are prevalent in everyday communication technologies, yet often difficult to comprehend.
On this day we will be joined by creative technologist and researcher Yasmine Boudiaf. In the morning, Yasmine will share her work on radical, ethical, data practice frameworks, propositions for how machine learning can be used in non-colonial (and therefore non-extractive) forms of archiving, and the mechanics of knowledge formation that affect our relationship with technology.
In the afternoon we will work through 'Listening Structures'. A research in practice, these exercises are a way to provide a space for ideas to sit and develop during group discussions. Intended as non-extractive, collective exercises, they move towards a decolonial, material-semiotic approach of knowledge co-creation.
Our worksession will close with the open screening of selection of artist films that respond to themes of the day. We will share artist and filmmaker Riar Rizaldi's 'Fossilis' and more films TBA.
"What separates the Earth, mind, body and machines? 'Probably nothing' argued a future archaeologist.
A glimpse into the far future: in search of the ultimate truth about the past, meditates with her brain-machine interface of a crude neural network, machine learning and virtual world-building, a paleo-media-ontologist—with the help of a researcher—digs and scavenging the imagination of the past to recontextualise and reflect what it is called fossil relic in their time; a mountain of invisible electronic waste buried in a tropical landscape of the South".
The worksession is organised by amy pickles and Sofia Boschat-Thorez.
