Session 3: Out of Isolation

Amid the claim that society has never been more interconnected, many continue to be hidden or to hide—within the walls of prisons, through the apparatuses that sequester the sick and disabled, because public life is too dangerous and too hostile, because colonization and globalization have rendered communities diffuse and divided. Even those with relative access and security can understand themselves to be alone. Yet, against and out of the institutions and ideologies that structure isolation, artists and activists seek to connect people and communities. This panel will ask a group of artists, all of whom take social life as both their medium and subject: How might we use digital space to create networks of care and interdependence, as well as structural transformation and economic redistribution? What digitally-driven strategies do we have for reducing the harm of systemic physical and emotional isolation? Why is art (as it is inflected by technology) still a space for seeking liberatory possibilities, even as the state attempts to foreclose the possibility of liberation for so many?

Speakers: Christopher Glazek, activist and writer; Jamal T. Lewis, filmmaker and artist; Elizabeth Mputu, artist; and Christopher Kulendran Thomas, artist.

Moderator: Grace Dunham

Documentation from Open Score: The State of Art & Technology, a day-long conference organized by the New Museum and Rhizome, December 10, 2016.

Session 2: Together in Electric Dreams

Machine intelligence is often figured in popular culture and software applications in the form of the virtual assistant, often female, performing automated emotional labor on behalf of a user. This anthropomorphized, gendered, subservient form of AI bears little resemblance to the diverse forms of machine intelligence that will one day organize many facets of our world. Computation already allows for the automation of crucial aspects of cognitive labor under capitalism, making the task of understanding new theories of mind, and their implications, all the more imperative. Speculating about and planning for the effects of new kinds of intelligence requires greater leaps of the imagination. The panel will ask: how might artists develop new images, new language, and new ways of relating to machine intelligence? What new forms of identity and intersubjectivity might emerge from this process?

Speakers: Katherine Cross, writer; Ian Cheng, artist; Sondra Perry, artist; and Patricia Reed, artist.

Moderator: Nora Khan