[Air-L] Protocols, among humans and machines - 4S open panel

[Nathan Schneider]

Friends, forgive me for another 4S panel posting, but I think it might interest some of you. Please propose:

ARTWORKS 🎨
RESEARCH 🔎
THEORIES 📃
PROTOCOLS 🎌
(MAYBE WE NEED NEW EMOJI FOR THAT!)
AND MORE.

153. Protocols, among humans and machines
Nathan Schneider, University of Colorado Boulder

Infrastructure; Indigenous STS; Information, Computing and Media Technology

Protocol is a word and concept that has traveled widely, from Indigenous practices that defend against colonization to the rudimentary rules of the internet. Artists and technologists have begun taking the concept more seriously, both as a site of critique and as a technique of liberation. Scholarship on the topic, however, has not kept pace. Some scholars have focused just narrowly on a specific set of protocols, such as internet standards, without connecting them to protocols in other contexts. Other scholars have written off protocol as solely a form of control from above, without accounting for the ways in which living communities are turning to it as a strategy of sovereignty, resistance, and survival.

This panel seeks to hold space for this concept at 4S, and in particular to explore the potentials for solidarity that unfold from it. Papers and creative works are welcome that explore protocol across both human and technical domains, and that identify opportunities for this expansive concept to help build linkages across them.

https://www.4sonline.org/accepted_open_panels_toronto.php


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Nathan Schneider
Associate Profesor, Media Studies
University of Colorado Boulder