Hello AoIR-ists, As many of you will have heard, the date for the Australian Indigenous Voice Referendum was last week announced for Saturday October 14, 2023. Unfortunately, this now clashes with the date for the Study-In on AI + Race + Art and after discussion with our partners at CoVA and Art & Australia, *we have decided to take a step back and postpone the event.* As organisers, we feel that the significance and weight of the Voice as a collective, historical event outweighs our own individual priorities. So with this in mind, the new details for the study-in event are: - *Date: Saturday 2nd December, 2023, 10am - 6pm* - *Venue: TBC, Melbourne/Naarm.* The application deadline has also been extended to Friday 6 October, 2023 with notification outcomes by late October 2023. Visit the Art + Australia website for more information: https://www.artandaustralia.com/58_1/p143/study-in-on-ai-race-art Please circulate widely. All the best, Thao, Andrew & Joel --- *Study-In on AI + Race + Art* ****NEW DATE, LOCATION, & APPLICATION DEADLINE**** *Time & Location (updated!):* —Saturday 2nd December 2023, 10am-6.00pm —Venue TBC *Deadline for applications (updated):* Friday 6 October, 2023, midnight (extended, previously 8 September) *Curated by:* Thao Phan (Monash), Andrew Brooks (UNSW), and Joel Stern (RMIT) *Details on how to apply visit:* https://www.artandaustralia.com/58_1/p143/study-in-on-ai-race-art *About the event:* What is study? For Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, study is a form of sociality. It is a meeting with, a brushing against, a bumping up of people, texts, ideas and things. It is the creation of a mutual and unpayable debt; a debt that is 'without count, without interest, without repayment.' As Moten states: study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around
with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice.
This event is an exercise in precisely this kind of practice. It invites writers, researchers, activists, artists and others together for a day of speculative thinking, talking, listening and experimentation on the topic of AI, race, and art. Terms like ‘AI’ are already associated with speculation—speculative fictions, speculative profits, speculative job losses, speculative risks and harms. Art also finds value in its connection to the speculative—speculative practice, speculative experiments, speculative funding, speculative futures. And critical work on race also productively turns to speculation when the empirical facts of inequity and injustice fail to create social change—speculative world-making and speculative methods to realise racial justice. This event combines these different strands of speculation, holding together disparate threads that may gesture to abstract and indeterminate futures but are all irreducibly historical, political, and situated. It focuses on AI, race and art because these are topics that need to be studied, that must be studied because they have implications on such things as subjectivity, politics, inequality, and aesthetics. It takes the form of a ‘Study-in’, that is, a temporary school that will interrogate AI and race, developing new methods and approaches to study that draw from and feed into artistic methods and strategies. It begins from the proposition that the challenge of understanding race in the contemporary moment requires responses that are equal parts creative, critical, technical, and collective. Through the process of collective study, the event will also build what might be called a speculative curriculum. Here, we take the traces of what Harney and Moten describe as the 'empty shell of what used to be called education' to cobble together a resource that can exceed the time and place of the ‘Study-in’ as an event and can be used by ourselves and others as an occasion for future study. The event is motivated by questions such as: - How are bodies classified, recognised, and operationalised by Artifical Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) systems that are situated within colonial and imperial histories and contexts? - How are group-based differentials—such as race, gender, sexuality—shaped by data-driven technologies and AI systems? - How do these technologies move us beyond understanding race and gender as either purely biological or purely cultural? - And how might contemporary artistic practice help us to experiment, challenge, trouble, blow apart, and piece back together entanglements with technology, embodiment, and difference? The Study-in is a day interrogating these questions and is curated by Thao Phan, Andrew Brooks, and Joel Stern in collaboration with CoVA, Art + Australia, and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society (ADM+S). *Applications close:* Friday 6 October September, 2023, midnight (extended, previously 8 September) *For more information or to apply, visit: * https://www.artandaustralia.com/58_1/p143/study-in-on-ai-race-art