Hi AoIRists! Excited to announce that applications are now open for the ‘Study-in on AI + Race + Art’ in Melbourne on 18 October, 2023! We invite 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. Hosted by the ADM+S with the VCA Centre of Visual Art (CoVA) and Art & Australia. This is a free event with limited bursaries available to assist those who need to travel, have caring responsibilities, or would otherwise not be able to attend without financial assistance Places are limited and participants are expected to attend all sessions. Participants will be selected via a short EoI process. *Deadline is Friday 8 September, midnight*. Featured artists/speakers include: André Dao, Hoang Tran Nguyen, Jasmin Pfefferkorn, Thao Phan, Snack Syndicate (Andrew Brooks + Astrid Lorange), Tom Smith, Joel Spring, and more to be announced! Full details below. Please share widely among your networks. All the best, Thao Phan +++ *Study-In on AI + Race + Art* *Time & Location:* —Saturday 14 October 2023, 10am-6.00pm —The Stables, VCA Southbank *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 8 September, 2023, midnight. *For more information or to apply, visit: * https://www.artandaustralia.com/58_1/p143/study-in-on-ai-race-art [image: ADM_S_Brandmark_RGB_Tagline_Horizontal_Pos.png]