The Trouble with Visibility | moderated by Nelly Y. Pinkrah @ Angewandte Interdiscipli­nary Lab: Decolonizing Technology | Nov 25

«The Trouble with Visibility», with Ramon Amaro and Tiara Roxanne, moderation: Nelly Y. Pinkrah @ Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab

«The Trouble with Visibility»
This event is part of the series Decolonizing Technology in cooperation with the Department of Media Theory of the University of Applied Arts Vienna

Decolonizing Technology

What does it mean to decolonize technology, and how can it be that technology generates a colonizing practice in the first place?

‘And this might be an opening for us: if we think about technologies as being a part of us, as reflections of ourselves, then we can finally engage with them properly.

At the heart of machine learning, which mostly catches our eye in the form of algorithmic recommender systems, is the simple logic of sifting through big chunks of data and turning them into information. This requires a particular logic or pattern that reflects our social behavior. After all, it is not the technologies that are male and white but the ideas they are fed. 

[…] algorithms learn from our data and therefore adopt everything that is part of it, including our racist, sexist, classist and ableist prejudices as well as heteronormative concepts. We are thus confronted with self-fulfilling prophecies, which are then relabeled as objective decision-making processes.’*

Together with the department of Media Theory, we present lectures, talks and performances, mainly from the field of digital cultures, circling around the topic of ‘Decolonizing Technology’

*Excerpts from the Interview with Clemens Apprich, head of the Department of Media Theory, find the whole Interview below