[Air-L] Visual Cultures Spring Term Public Programme: 'Race and/as Technology, ' February 27th-March 27th

[Scott Wark]

*Visual Cultures Spring Public Programme: Race and/as Technology*

You are cordially invited to attend Goldsmiths’ Department of Visual
Cultures’ Spring Term Public Programme, a series of lectures organised
around the theme ‘Race and/as Technology.’

All lectures are free and open to all, with no need to register, and take
place *Thursdays, 5pm – 7pm, Professor Stuart Hall Building, Room LG01,
Goldsmiths, University of London*.

The series has been running for 4 weeks, with prior events including a
screening of *Geomancer *by Lawrence Lek (2017) and lectures by Scott Wark
(Goldsmiths), Aleena Chia (Goldsmiths), and Brett Zehner (Exeter).

It continues Thursdays from *February 27th – March 27th with *lectures by
Eunsong Kim (Northeastern; online), Ramon Amaro (Het Nieuwe Instituut,
Rotterdam); Beryl Pong (Cambridge), Derica Shields (writer and editor), and
Maya Indira Ganesh (Cambridge) and Thao Phan (Australian National
University).

Please see below for a description of the series’ rationale and abstracts
for upcoming lectures. For more information, please get in touch with the
series organiser, *Scott Wark* (s.wark at gold.ac.uk).



*Series Overview*

In 2013, the media theorist Wendy H. K Chung published an essay entitled
‘Race and/as Technology, or, How to do Things with Race.’ The premise of
this provocative essay was to (re)conceptualise race as something that is
external to racialized subjects; something, as she puts it, that is *done* to
subjects and something that they can *do*.

Using Chun’s proposition as a guiding thread, Visual Cultures’ Spring
2025 Public Programme interrogates the intersections, conflicts,
confluences and divergences of race and technology when these two terms are
thought *and/as*.

How are the impacts of technical ‘innovation’ and ‘disruption’ unequally
experienced by racialized subjects? What new geographies of racialized
inclusion/exclusion are drawn by such technologies? Do digital technologies
offer opportunities for liberation from racial oppression, or increase
racialised discrimination? How does race intersect with modes of capital
accumulation aided by technological ‘progress? And finally – to push this
logic to its limit – what happens to ‘race’ itself, as experience but also
as concept, as identity markers such as race are increasingly dissolved
into data and subject to AI techniques?



*February 27th, 2025: *Found / Property: Museums, Race and the Making of
Labor Divisions, Eunsong Kim [online]

This talk will be informed by *The Politics of Collecting: Race & the
Aestheticization of Property* (Duke University Press 2024). This book
materializes the histories of immaterialism by examining the rise of US
museums, avant-garde forms, digitization, and neoliberal aesthetics, to
consider how race and property become foundational to modern artistic
institutions.

*Eunsong Kim* is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at
Northeastern University. Her practice spans: poetics, literary studies, and
translation. She is the author of *gospel of regicide*, published by Noemi
Press in 2017, and with Sung Gi Kim she translated Kim Eon Hee’s poetic
text *Have You Been Feeling Blue These Days?* published in 2019. Her
monograph, *The Politics of Collecting: Race & the Aestheticization of
Property* (Duke University Press 2024) materializes the histories of
immaterialism by examining the rise of US museums, avant-garde forms,
digitization, and neoliberal aesthetics, to consider how race and property
become foundational to modern artistic institutions. She is the recipient
of the Ford Foundation Fellowship, a grant from the Andy Warhol Art Writers
Program, and Yale’s Poynter Fellowship. In 2021 she co-founded offshoot, an
arts space for transnational activist conversations.



*March 6th, 2025: *The ascent, the exploration, and a more general
mythology on techno-elitism and engineering, Ramon Amaro

This talk ends by considering notions of the contemporary human condition,
or more so what to do with and about the fanatic discipline of technical
engineering, at the hands of which we find ourselves stuck within the
problem of a techno-humanist society led by Silicon elites, and the general
misunderstanding of the role of technique within the current neotenic
development of the human species. That is to say, my exploration emerges
out of the urgency to place a new frame of meaning onto the exchange
between solutionism, engineering, and environment, as presently situated
within a world given to us as phenomena to experience rather than dominate.
I argue that an awareness of this mode of existence must be thought through
at the level of the vital in understanding the association between the
technical milieu and practices of socio-technical manipulation and control.
Here, I question how technicism plays a central role in culture-specific
individual psychic and collective realities, and how these realities seek
to compensate for the alienating results of techno-social being. Our
discussion, nonetheless, begins with the story of a prince, a slave ship,
and a Portuguese book seller before moving through a historical view of the
engineer as ceremonial being and catalyst of new world orders.

*Dr. Ramon Amaro* is Senior Researcher for Digital Culture and Lead Curator
at -1
<https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnieuweinstituut.nl%2Fen%2Fprojects%2Fminus-one&data=05%7C02%7CS.Wark%40gold.ac.uk%7Cfe2eb88429134cdd67b108dd49a9501f%7C0d431f3f20c1461c958a46b29d4e021b%7C0%7C0%7C638747713812416194%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=X3YI4AusCIjS6qd9vzxtSpJjMLduJnJo5CwdkGjF2wo%3D&reserved=0>,
an experimental testing ground for new tools, methods and public uses of
digital culture at Nieuwe Instituut, the national museum and institute for
architecture, design and digital culture in The Netherlands. His writings,
research and artistic practice emerge at the intersections of Black Study,
digital culture, psychosocial study, and the critique of computational
reason. Ramon holds a BSe in Mechanical Engineering, an MA in Sociology and
a PhD in Philosophy of Technology. Before joining Nieuwe Instituut, Ramon
worked as Lecturer in Art and Visual Cultures of the Global South at UCL ,
Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, Engineering Program Manager at
the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and Quality Design Engineer
at General Motors Corporation. His recent book, *The Black Technical
Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being* contemplates
the abstruse nature of programming and mathematics, and the deep incursion
of racial hierarchy, to inspire alternative approaches to contemporary
algorithmic practice.



*March 13th, 2025: *Volumetric Mediations: Atmospheres of Crisis and
Unbelonging in Humanitarian Drone Documentaries, Beryl Pong

This talk takes as its starting point the argument made during the first
wave of critical drone studies, which primarily focused on drone warfare,
that the drone is a ‘technology of racial distinction’ (Allinson, 2015). In
this context, drones have been conceived of as atmospheric technologies
that engage in ‘racialization from above’ (Feldman, 2011): that target the
minoritized while rendering the Westphalian border fluid and contingent,
engaging in ‘ordering without bordering’ (Agius, 2017). In this talk, I
will extend and re-consider this argument for the realm of forced
migration. Focusing on the use of drones at the borders, variously
conceived, where migrants are delayed, contained, or rendered immobile, I
ask how ‘civilian’ drone culture in the form of humanitarian drone
documentaries makes visible the nexus of race, border, and atmosphere in
new ways. In particular, I will explore how drone documentaries about
forced migration involve ‘volumetric’ mediations that engage with
three-dimensional space with complex heights and depths (Jackman and
Squire, 2021). In doing so, they create spaces of vexed encounter and
relationality between the seer and the seen, to present different
atmospheres of migration: as crisis, from above, and as unbelonging, from
below.

*Beryl Pong* is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the Centre for the Future
of Intelligence, University of Cambridge, where she directs the Centre for
Drones and Culture. She is the author of *British Literature and Culture in
Second World Wartime: For the Duration* (Oxford University Press, 2020),
and the co-editor of *Drone Aesthetics: War, Culture, Ecology* (Open
Humanities Press, 2024). Her writing on drones and culture have appeared or
are forthcoming in *Big Data & Society*, *Collateral*,* Cultural Politics,
Journal of War and Culture*, and elsewhere. Her immersive installation
about drone warfare, *Beware Blue Skies*, is showing at the Imperial War
Museum, London until March 2025.



*March 20th, 2025: *Derica Shields [title TBC]



*March 27th, 2025: *Who's Represented/What's Unrepresentable: Two Lectures
on AI and Race, by Maya Indira Ganesh and by Thao Phan (presenting a talk
co-authored with Fabian Offert)



*Maya Indira Ganesh: ‘I became a Woman of Colour in 2013’: De-centering
Whiteness for Savarna-ness in thinking about technology and power.*

This is a short and early conversation about re-configuring studies of AI
and bias away from a positionality that centres Whiteness chiefly because
it obscures the axes of power and discrimination that matter in the lived
realities of the global majority. Indian Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi (DBA)
scholars have already developed a body of work showing the intersections of
caste power, discrimination, and technology. As their work, and that of new
Dalit intellectuals argue, caste is not just another demographic marker to
be ticked off in a bias mitigation toolkit. This is partly to do with how
caste privilege and hierarchies present and are experienced. But a more
compelling reason is that we are still in need of radical and speculative
approaches that might flip the script by drawing attention to Savarna
privilege and how power works rather than  how oppression is experienced.

*Thao Phan and Fabian offert: Are some things (still) unrepresentable?*

“Are some things unrepresentable?” asks a 2011 essay by Alexander Galloway.
It responds to a similarly titled, earlier text by the philosopher Jacques
Ranciére examining the impossibility of representing political violence,
with the Shoa as its anchor point. How, or how much political violence,
asks Ranciére, can be represented? What visual modes, asks Galloway, can be
used to represent the unrepresentable? In this talk, we examine two
contemporary artistic projects that deal with this problem of
representation in the age of artificial intelligence.

Exhibit.ai, the first project, was conceived by the prominent Australian
law firm Maurice Blackburn and focuses on the experiences of asylum seekers
incarcerated in one of Australia’s infamous “offshore processing centers.”
It attempts to bring ‘justice through synthesis’, to mitigate forms of
political erasure by generating an artificial record using AI imagery.
Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Power and Technology, 1500-2025, the
second project, is a “large-scale research visualization exploring the
historical and political dependence of AI on systems of exploitation in the
form of a room-sized flow chart.

On the surface, the two projects could not be more unlike: the first using
AI image generators to create photorealistic depictions of political
violence as a form of nonhuman witnessing (Richardson), the second using
more-or-less traditional forms of data visualization and information
aesthetics to render visible the socio-technical ‘underbelly’ of artificial
intelligence. And yet, as we argue, both projects construct a highly
questionable representational politics of artificial intelligence, where a
tool which itself is unrepresentable for technical reasons becomes an
engine of ethical and political representation. While images are today said
to be “operational”, meaning that they no longer function as primarily
indexical objects, AI images (arguably the most operational image) are now
asked to do the representational (and profoundly political) work of
exposing regimes of power, exploitation, and violence.



*Maya Indira Ganesh *is Associate Director (Research Culture and
Partnerships), co-director of the Narratives and Justice Program,
<https://www.lcfi.ac.uk/research/programme/ai-narratives-and-justice> and a
Senior Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of
Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. From October 2021- July 2024
she was an assistant teaching professor co-directing the MSt in AI Ethics
and Society <https://www.lcfi.ac.uk/education/mst/> at the university. Maya
has degrees in Psychology, Media and Cultural Studies, and a DPhil in
Cultural Studies. Her doctoral work took the case of the ‘ethics of
autonomous driving’ to study the implications of ethical decision-making
and governance by algorithmic/AI technologies for human social relations.
Her monograph based on this thesis, *Auto-Correct: The Fantasies and
Failures of AI, Ethics, and the Driverless Ca*r, will be available on March
10, 2025 and can be pre-ordered here
<https://artezpress.artez.nl/books/auto-correct/>. Maya’s most recent
project, with Louise Hickman and others, is AI in the Street
<https://www.careful.industries/ai-in-the-street/overview>, a project about
AI in public and AI’s marginalised and expert publics.

*Thao Phan* is a feminist science and technology studies (STS) researcher
who specialises in the study of gender and race in algorithmic culture. She
is a Lecturer in Sociology (STS) at the Research School for Social Sciences
at the Australian National University (ANU). Thao has published on topics
including whiteness and the aesthetics of AI, big-data-driven techniques of
racial classification, and the commercial capture of AI ethics research.
She is the co-editor of the volumes An Anthropogenic Table of Elements
(University of Toronto Press) and Economies of Virtue: The Circulation of
'Ethics' in AI (Institute of Network Cultures), and her writing appears in
journals such as Big Data & Society, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory,
Technosocience, Science as Culture, and Cultural Studies. She is a member
of the Australian Academy of Science’s National Committee for the History
and Philosophy of Science and is the co-founder of AusSTS—Australia’s
largest network of STS scholars.