This collaborative One Day Laboratory Jetsam offers an art and practice-based exploration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the way it reflects and reproduces certain normative practices of gender and sexuality, to ultimately foster more diverse and radical entanglements with digital technologies.

From the backdrop of case studies in art, artistic research, technoscience studies and queer activism, Acts of Queering AI proposes blurring of boundaries between nature and culture, technology and biology, and the human and the non-human as fundamental intersectional power systems of difference. We collaboratively explore the relationship between queerness and AI from a perspective that posits data-visualisation and queer knowledge design as central to understanding AI differently. In which ways can visualisations such as in avatars reframe the relationship between datafication and the queer body? Stressing the socially constructed nature of AI, the artist and researchers pose questions about the politics and ethics of machine embodiments and data imaginaries on the one hand, and about technical possibilities for a more-than-human production of social identities characterised by shifting diversity and multiplicity on the other, as they are mediated by and through digital interventions.

The Lab is a special stage for new, unexpected, and groundbreaking relationalities between human and non-human bodies ("biohacking", "queering 'trans-nature'", "self-design sexes" etc.), and its ongoing transformation into a posthuman world from the perspectives of art, data-mappings and knowledge design.

Programme

- each presentation includes 15 minutes Q&A - 

10:00 | Annette Jael Lehmann (Freie Universität Berlin/EXC 2020, metaLAB (at) FU Berlin) & Jeffrey Schnapp (Harvard University, metaLAB (at) Harvard): Welcome Remarks

10:15 | Kim Albrecht & Annette Jael Lehmann (metaLAB (at) Berlin & Harvard): Introduction and Exploration of the Programme

Dialogue I: Case Studies on Queering Decolonial AI
Moderator: Florian Conradi (Technische Universität Berlin, Einstein Center Digital Future) 

10:30

Nora Al Badri (Artist): Technoheritage and the Post-Truth Museum: decolonising collections as practice

Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal (University of Notre Dame): Does Size Matter? On Scale and Foundation AI Models

12:00 | Lunch Break 

Dialogue II: Case Studies on Biohacking and Self-Design Sexes
Moderator: Aylin Tschoepe (Basel Academy of Art and Design) 

13:00 | Lyndsey Walsh (Artist): Monstrous Mutabilities and Living Machines

Follow-Up Conversation with Michelle Christensen (Technische Universität Berlin, Einstein Center Digital Future)

14:30 | Coffee Break

Dialogue III: Case Studies on Deep Fakes in AI
Moderator: Dario Rodighiero (University of Groningen)

14:45 | Charmaine Poh (Artist): THE YOUNG BODY UNIVERSE

Follow-Up Conversation with Anna-Catharina Gebbers (Hamburger Bahnhof Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart)

16:15 | Short Break

16:30 | Annette Jael Lehmann & Jeffrey Schnapp: Wrap-Up & Closing Remarks