Discriminating Data, a conversation with Wendy Chun
11 OCTOBER 2022 | 18h30 | GRANDE AUDITÓRIO DA FBAUL
Free entry, booking required
Organised by CADA in partnership with the Lisbon Architecture Triennale and the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon (Departments of Communication Design and of Multimedia Arts), as part of the public talks programme Human Entities 2022: culture in the age of artificial intelligence.
Discriminating Data, a conversation with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
(Canada 150 Chair in New Media, Director, Digital Democracies Institute)
In Discriminating Data [2021], Wendy Hui Kyong Chun reveals how polarization is a goal—not an error—within big data and machine learning. These methods, she argues, encode segregation, eugenics, and identity politics through their default assumptions and conditions. Correlation, which grounds big data’s predictive potential, stems from twentieth-century eugenic attempts to “breed” a better future. Recommender systems foster angry clusters of sameness through homophily. Users are “trained” to become authentically predictable via a politics and technology of recognition. Machine learning and data analytics thus seek to disrupt the future by making disruption impossible.
In this conversation, Chun will discuss the themes of her book with Andrea Pavoni, assistant research professor at DINAMIA’CET and then take questions from the audience.
The talk will be in English and followed by a Q&A session.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is the Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University, and leads the Digital Democracies Institute. She studied Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines in her current work on digital media, and is the author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (2011), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (2016) and, more recently, Discriminating Data (2021).
https://www.sfu.ca/communication/team/faculty/wendy-chun.html
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/discriminating-data
https://twitter.com/whkchun
This event is part of the public talks programme Human Entities 2022: culture in the age of artificial intelligence, Sixth edition, organised by CADA in partnership with the Lisbon Architecture Triennale. Conversation with Wendy Chun organized in partnership with the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon (Departments of Communication Design and of Multimedia Arts).
Funded by: República Portuguesa – Cultura / Direção-Geral das Artes
Support: Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, DINAMIA’CET (ISCTE-IUL) and NOVA LINCS through FCT.IP funds
Design: Marco Balesteros (LETRA)
Photography: Joana Linda