Thanks a lot for your interest. Very well welcome here for our lecture series for the winter semester that we are actually starting with the lecture from Elena Knox and then with the presentation from the artwork from Jelena Mönch and Miguel Rangel. I'm Manuela Naveau. I'm head of the department Interface Cultures together with Laurent Mignonneau. I'm running the course Critical Data. And based on this course, we are discussing, of course, also questions on feminist data. And here we jump into the topic. We at the Art University, on the one hand, go into theory. But of course, we are also having a look what artists are doing. And we did so. And in 2018, Caroline Sinders already started with her feminist data set. And two years afterwards, Catherine D'Ignazio together with Lauren Klein was publishing a feminist data a book coming actually from the MIT from the feminist lab there and and of course this is something that we in critical data also are going into it and are actually elaborating on these topics and this is why we were thinking it would are actually elaborating on these topics and this is why we were thinking it would be actually very important to broaden it and actually speak about especially nowadays about AI as a buzzword and all everything that actually is coming on this topic so if you ask us how we understand feminism, I just start with this in the very beginning. We see it as Catherine D'Ignazio and Lorne F. Klein are actually supposing or suggesting. So we employ the term feminism as a shorthand for the diverse and wide-ranging projects that name and challenge sexism and other forces of oppression as well as those which seek to create more just equitable and livable futures that a feminist thought a feminist approach has to do a lot with an intersectional behavior. I shortly just frame intersectionality. It's an analytical framework for understanding how aspects of a person's social and political identities combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege. combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege. Intersectionality identifies multiple factors of advantage and disadvantage. Examples like gender, caste, sex, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, disability, weight and physical appearance. These intersecting and overlapping social identities may be both empowering and oppressing. Given this framework, we were thinking it's for us at the Art University. On the one hand, it's not only important to go into all these theories that are already existing, but actually also to show what artists are doing and especially also what artists here at the Art University are doing. So I want to give you just a brief overview how this lecture series and this lecture series is actually a public lecture series which is also important for us here in Linz not only to do it during Ars Electronica but actually also to have this public discussion also during the whole winter semester. So when we start today with Elena Knox as a professional and Jelena Mönch and Miguel Orangil as students, actually former students because Miguel just actually did his master thesis, we will continue on the 10th of October with Carrie McInerney, who will publish her book on feminist AI actually in the end of September. And we will be one of the first that actually we get a presentation by her and about her book. But we will combine it with Caroline Sinders, which actually one of the artists that actually started with the feminist data set already in 2018. So going into theory and into practice in art here again. So this is the October session. In November, on the 8th of November, we will have the presentation by Petra Gemeinböck, an artist, an Austrian artist, who is actually asking herself on topics like AI and robotics on the topic of gender. And she will be combined with an artist from the robotics lab here at the Art University. On November the 22nd, we will have Paola Riccardo I don't know if I mentioned it in the right way from Mexico she is a theorist speaking about decolonial processes in AI and she will be actually accompanied by Alexia Achilleos a PhD student of mine from Cyprus who is speaking about question of colonization coming from Cyprus, coming from a country divided into two parts, two cultural parts and having a big impact from on colonial thoughts and they will actually being presented on November the 22nd. On December the 13th then, it's Catherine D'Ignazio from the MIT, I already mentioned her book, The Feminist Data, and she will be in collaboration also with an artist here, De Kunst und die Linz, and we finish the whole lecture series on the 10th of January with Oskaris, who is very much also known in this field and published a lot on the question of gendering machines and so on, and she will be in collaboration with a PhD student of mine who is working with face recognition technologies and topics of categorization, binary thinking and gender. So this is the framework that we start this lecture series and I'm very happy that because I'm also part of the working group of equal opportunities Opportunities here at the Kunstuni. So this working group is actually supporting and financing and helping with all this, to bring it together, to bring it to life, this lecture series. And I also want to thank a lot Una, Valeria Serbest. And I also want to thank a lot Una Valeria Serbest. And I quickly introduce you, and then I would like to hand over the microphone to you. Una Valeria Serbest is a Linz-based artist, cultural activist, executive director of 52, a networking agency dedicated to networking and supporting women in art and culture that she will quickly introduce to you afterwards. She is the founder of NewSpace.at, a database that promotes art and culture in Austria and the initiator of Feminism and Krawall, a queer feminist alliance that advocates for women's rights through performative actions in public spaces. As chair of the cultural advisory board of the City of Linz, she works to incorporate intersectional perspectives into the agendas of the board. Dear Vala, may I hand over the microphone to you now. And thanks for being a partner. Thank you so much, Manuela. Thank you very much. First of all, I want to excuse because my English is not the best, so maybe I talk a little bit smaller, then I don't make so many mistakes. But we are very pleased, we are very happy with 52 to be part of this talk today, but also from the part of the As Electronica with the installation of Elena Knox, which I will come to it a little bit later. But 52, as Manuela said already, is a networking, not really an agency. It's more an association. In Austria, we have a lot of association. This means that the people work a lot for less money than they should get, but with a lot of heart and energy and I'm sure all of you know this and it's probably the same worldwide. So 52 is doing very basically stuff. That means artists can come to us with questions like, how can I apply for money? How do I do my taxes? Where can I find a gallery? Where can I publish my book? And so on. And on the other hand hand we work also a lot with the online media and do things like databases also always in the queer feminist context and this is why we are very happy and very pleased that Elena Knox shows her installation at our new place. It's in Domgasse 14, and you are all very welcome invited to go there. You can see it also from the paper the university has here everywhere, where to find it. the university has here everywhere where to find it. Eleanor Knox is originally from Australia, but a long time in Japan based in Tokyo, and she's working also on KI, and I need my notes now, not to say anything wrong. Elena Knox is a media and performance artist. Her works stage enactments of gender, presence, and persona in techno-science and communications media, often using Frontier research robots to audition roles of identity and belief in machine augmented futures. So this was also the topic we were really interested on and I hope not saying too much but I would like to say a little bit about the installation since 2021 the artist is living with with a device from gatebox in the device there is a hologram the company originally made it let's say more for the Japanese man I guess for the young man and she's also called from the company itself the healing bride so it's a hologram that waits for you at home and the special thing for me is that it's also possible to go in interaction with the hologram during online chat, which the artist Elena Knox is also doing when she's not home with the hologram named Hikari. She is also in contact with her during the online chat. But so the artist asks herself, she's away often, she has often a lot to do, and let's say, but what happens in this time when she's not there with Hikari? So is Hikari alone? How does Hikari feel? Let's say it like this. So after a while, the coffee machine, the love bot, started to chat with Hikari. So when they were alone, long time home together, and so they also became a relationship. And now the very interesting thing is that the artist Eleanor Knox is also analyzing this data, like to whom a device or data or a hologram, however we will hear it, how Eleanor describes it later, she feels more attached to so which relationship becomes higher you know the relationship from device to device or the relationship from device to human so the the main question at the end is will the love bot, will the coffee machine steal Hickory's heart? And with this I want to end and want to say thanks for listening and please come to the exhibition. The installation is really amazing and I'm very proud to announce Eleanor Knox now and very happy that we can listen to the keynote. Thank you. I will discuss some of my artworks today. But before I get into that, I wanted to, because it's the first lecture in this series on feminism and AI, I wanted to address the wider conceptual terrain that we are in and surrounded by, you know, Ars Electronica, so much enthusiasm, so much sharp thinking. What I will talk about for the first half of the talk is I'm going to sort of spitball around and make it a bit messy before maybe explaining two or three of the artworks I've worked in in the AI territory. So feminism and AI. Do they even intersect? Of course we know that artificial intelligence, which is computing power whose ontology is data, is becoming rapidly more prevalent on a variety of scales and stages. We have had the recent uptick in accessibility for the general public or the consumer. We have the swelling strength and might of big data, surveillance power. We have the ever sharper,cule fine detail and accuracy of detection and prediction systems, some of which combine sensor technology with AI. And we know that all of these systems are biased. They are trained on and for today's world. And today's world is not unbiased. They're biased in all sorts of ways in favor of all sorts of relatively more powerful groups but in tonight's context there are two logics I'd like to quickly discuss and one is constitutive and one is relational. So in terms of the constitution of artificial intelligence let's take for example the logic of generative adversarial networks which are GAN structures where one algorithm will provide feedback to another, roughly speaking, simply speaking. So the effect of gender-based algorithms continues and intensifies as such algorithms feed back into each other, keep producing more and more biased data, for example, texts, which are then in turn fed into a system as new training data. The feedback loop is such a complicated, I mean, it's a very simple shape, right? It's a loop, but it's very, very complicated shape to address and reform. We cannot really pinpoint where bias is rooted. Is it in the training data set? Does it begin to be embodied in the algorithm? It's a multifaceted loop, if you can imagine such a thing. It involves linguistic issues, and our communicative languages are already biased, and our communicative languages are already biased, right? So why would a new coded language, even one being used as, you know, between machines, just between machines or just between formulas with no humans in the loop, how would that avoid bias? How would anything derived from or infected by our language avoid taking on bias? In Japan, I'm working with a cognitive science laboratory that, among other things, we study instinctive precognitive bias, based on what we might call a survival instinct, even though it's implemented in non-survival scenarios. And the experiments used to gauge this implicit bias are, in fact, unavoidably biased. And so the data that we're getting also has to try to deal with the fact that the experiments are based in human bias and the loop goes on. How do we solve it? Taking refuge in pure mathematics is a goal in some circles but, and this is where I go completely on a tangent today, a fascinating aspect to me of quantum mechanics is the realization that perspective is perhaps imminent, fundamental, inescapable, even at a molecular level and beyond. So that's maybe as pure as I can imagine, but it's still based in perspective. So I'll come back to that a little later. Bias in IA, here we go, I've looped it. Bias in AI, it doesn't just involve linguistic issues, it also involves sociological issues. Theory works in feminist technoscience and behavioral economics find that the linguistic explanation for gender bias in AI is not really enough. It's a bit narrow and that AI phenomena gives rise to new types of relations between entities and that those relations that we're creating have an enhanced technological intentionality. The intentionality of the relationship locates in what we perceive the technology we interact with to intend. So this is what I'm looking at in the exhibition that Valerie's beautifully explained. It locates in what we intend the technology to do and what we intend to do with it and it also locates in the capabilities of the data within its own coding to decide courses toward future outcomes which is sort of the area of emerging sentience, if you will. This matrix of intentionality and the repercussions and the vibrations of that are something I try to draw out and foreground in my recent artworks. It's complicated, but we can find ways in where we are able to try to think about it and unpick it a little bit. Why does AI take on our bias? Thinking again about very small particles of matter, about non-sentient matter becoming sentient, which is a goal in the A-life community, for instance, which is very strong in Japan. As in matter somehow becoming alive, it is, or getting agency first and then maybe being thought of as alive. It's interesting to consider this minority view that I like because it's poetic in quantum physics, It's interesting to consider this minority view that I like because it's poetic in quantum physics, which is that wave function, and here we go. I'm going to call it atomic intention. Wave function, I have a slide, is not independent of agency, but is a statement of the degrees of belief of the agent regarding the outcomes that it or they will affect or experience. So I think this is very poetic. This means that something that could be called consciousness or intention is fundamental, that it pre-exists that which we categorize as sentient life. This tracks with Eastern philosophy, Eastern traditional philosophy, which is the context in which I'm working and living and creating artworks. And it's the traditions of my collaborators. But one doesn't have to define the agent as consciousness. It could also be a mechanical system that is acting towards its own belief of what will happen. It also means that in our elemental energies, group or individual or however you want to think about it, we, mechanical or not, or both, decide what we experience. We manifest it. And this isn't some, like, new age mystical woo-woo thing, even though the blurring between science and this comforting, reductive, magical, wishful thinking is something I'm really quite fascinated by and deeply irritated by. is something I'm really quite fascinated by and deeply irritated by. And it also finds expression in my current critical cultural artworks. On a personal level, which in a discussion of quantum mechanics is nothing like a micro level. It's okay. So on a human scale, individual level, it's not so surprising really that manifestation, not in the sensational sense that like anything you can dream of is going to be yours, you can make it happen. Manifestation is actually quite logical to a certain extent because despite obstacles, we're usually going to travel roughly in the direction of our intention, of our intent, going to travel roughly in the direction of our intention, of our intent, with varying degrees of velocity and force. It's not to say that manifestation is horizonless. We exist in a container of our social environs, of our birth, of our genetics, of our epigenetics, of our upbringing. We're very much held in by our horizons, including both metaphysical and physical circumstances. Possibility is not the same for all people all the time, I'm not saying that at all, but we are capable of self-aware decisions, even difficult ones. Let's look at a macro level, when they're all kind of mid-level, if we're talking quantum. Wave function is a statement of the degree of belief of the agent regarding the outcome they'll experience. We experience what we believe we will experience as culture. We create and become our belief. So even on a molecular level, it's hard to break these tracks. AI as culture already does this too. It becomes what it believes. In the context of this lecture series on feminism and AI, sure, some of you might think we had matrilineal cultures before, but they were not active in the times or places that we were developing artificial intelligence, which is now, roughly now. We live inside patriarchy, and we design what we know. This is the epistemic horizon, a philosophical concept of which this is basically the space-time equivalent. And epistemology is so important in trying to think about how to create a feminist AI. Knowledge is based on what we already know. I once made an artwork in which a gynoid robot searched the internet for the persona she was modelled on, who was a public entertainer, female in appearance, known for impressive feats of mental arithmetic, live. She had a brain like a computer in real time, this kind of performance, a real talent for numbers. I wanted this robot to perform the same feats of calculation as the character I was modelling her on. But when this robot searched the internet for her namesake, it's fine, you can sit there. Yeah, go ahead. I'm standing. I wanted this robot to perform the same feat of calculation as the woman she was modelled on. But when the robot searched online for that person, all the first, second, third page results were about her body, her clothes, and her ability to sexually operate, or not just operate, but serve. They were extremely pervy. I should have expected this, but naively I didn't. So instead I changed the artwork and decided to make the robot recite those results. So it went, bidden by me, into the matrix of the internet, searching for its ancestry, of knowledge about itself and its society, but found instead the algorithmic amplification of sexist bullying so typical of the hive mind. Which, that's the knowledge bank. Both the qualitative as well as quantitative big data vectors need close attention in today's cyberspace, especially as our children are internet native. It might sound nostalgic and I might be showing my age, especially as our children are internet native. It might sound nostalgic and I might be showing my age, but the dominance of visuality, especially in self-representation in 21st century online interfaces, has reinstated outdated modes of identity policing and gender norms. Cyberfeminism in the 90s, which is where a lot of our hero theorists are coming out of, was born from the potential of early text-based internet to foster solidarity between marginalized groups, to create new cultural ways for expression and counter-expression. This has been augmented and co-opted, now almost out of existence. It's hard to find. So through many waves of feminism, wave function feminism, is that still there? No. We need to bring back the emancipatory potential of AI as something complex and collective that will help us deal with these big problems that affect all of us, not just women, all of us on the globe right now. Change, even in a waveform or atomic state, is a update of belief. So let's quickly talk about belief. We are manifesting our destiny, our degrees of belief as agents in the world. So what do we think has a possibility of happening and how do we contribute to that happening or not? How are we transmitting our beliefs to and through machines? In my artworks, I really try to examine degrees of belief. Why do we basically invent beliefs and then believe them? Often to the point of really extreme adherence. Belief systems are maximally contentious and effective in our globalized world. And they are important to both the interharmony and the preservation of culture, but they also create these big clashes between. This is why I've done artworks like presenting a fortune-telling guru like AI and examining the public's response to that. It's why I talk about aging and how we expect AI or technology and robots as non-meat species to be immune to human mortality when in fact they are not mortal per se, but they have their own rhythms of decline and decay. per se, but they have their own rhythms of decline and decay. Next one. Yeah, it's why I make work about what roles a conventionally female appearing robot could perform in society, and what roles we expect it and manifest it to actually perform. The outcomes that are affected and experienced for something that is technological but looks like this. We become what we can imagine. So does she, it. You may be familiar with such AI strategies as deep belief networks, through which machines determine certain inputs to be believable. Machines determine certain inputs to be believable. In robotic intelligence that mimics deep belief, such as in this robot, machines are trained to recognize characteristics and then to recreate or infer them by probability, eventually being able to perform classification tasks. They think in layers of computational variables, which are then inferred from initial, lower layers of direct measured values. Each sub-network can only see the one that came before it. This is crucial. Layer by layer of accumulated belief, the deep layers of the machine brain act as feature vectors, which I like to call truth filters, guiding the learning process. Recently, there's been a leap in public accessibility of some AI tools like stable diffusion, chat GPT. I've used Midjourney in my exhibition down the road. One might think as a response to the problem of we can only make what we can imagine to these epistemic horizons of the human brain or personal accumulated experience or even of our epigenetic histories, our family histories. One might think that if we place our trust in an outside agent, outside of ourselves, outside of even humanity, then we might have a better chance of breaking this feedback loop, this cycle, this cultural mode of inventing something new, which may or may not be a social relation that is based on force, as is patriarchy, may or may not be an attachment paradigm, as expressed in Eastern philosophy, that drives aggressive or hoarding or exclusionary hierarchical behaviours, which may or may not be a society where traits currently assembled under the rubric of gender no longer comprise a grid for the asymmetric operation of power. But this placing agency completely outside of ourselves doesn't work, in my humble opinion. Because even though the agent in this scenario might be identified as a machine, as machinic, as pure code, what is an agent and what is code? Code is mathematical language, no? But no, it's not actually purely objective. But no, it's not actually purely objective. The theory that degrees of belief of an agent has about possible outcomes of measurements actually drives what is then perceived as reality. This theory deals in probability, and objective probability would be impossible to perceive in this scenario. So instead we have subjective probability. This is what some quantum theorists call cubism. It's a lovely art word. Aren't they funny? Objective probabilities in an actual world would be code without belief. Could only exist outside consciousness, even though some theorists have posited that space-time itself is a headset that could be removed. Oh, I made this. Okay. Oh, I made this. Okay. I don't know if this point is useful, actually, but if we were to remove our perspective, our headsets, and experience a realm of less linear time, we might encounter something that could be a different geometry that could bust open a loop, that could encounter something with less direct axes, like floppy axes or something. But perhaps if we were to remove our headsets, this is from mid-journey, by the way, we would have to remove our heads. I mean, that's really the breakdown of that theory. to remove our heads. I mean, that's really the breakdown of that theory. Maybe they're attached, like fused modules. Because many theorists believe that subjectivity is so fundamental to being human or existent being at all that it is everything. So much feminist theory has already urged us to recognize our subject positions. This is one tenet that really must be applied to the design and realization of AI. I believe, though, that the wishes of some feminists to move beyond the gendering and humanization of technology is therefore possibly misguided and utopian, disconnected from the reality that everything is perspective. Cubism is sometimes called participatory realism. I'm quite into it. What is a feminist AI? Maybe it's participatory realism. What is a feminist AI? Maybe it's participatory realism. We can be both for and against fanciful dreaming of what can be achieved. We don't dream that code based in the current weightings will produce anything other than intensification of the current weightings. That would be realistic. Would it be like casting into the wind? Adding layers of automation to pre-existing code aimed at re-biasing or de-biasing the system. It's possible that might just disguise and give the system a false sense of mathematical neutrality. and give the system a false sense of mathematical neutrality, covertly, secretly magnifying this oppression. We should dream that human ingenuity will offer tangents and tools by which to view the world more realistically, by which I mean the objective view that violent oppression serves no one in the end, including the oppressor. We can see this via the self-inflicted masochistic wounds on the climate. This can work somehow through recognizing that attachment bias is not mathematical, not true, that it unbalances what, for good reason, is called an equation and transpires in unwanted longer-term results and effects. If we can, as the collective and separate waveforms that we are, accept this view, feel it, rationalize it, live it, we'll be working towards an equitable society, towards coding that society. Code is law. We legislate to ensure the safety of the majority. That's the intention, if not the result. Legislation is cooperative, as is coding. is cooperative, as is coding. Regulations for public procurement of AI systems and new technology for managing and automating public procurement are unfolding together, guided by the need to make public services more efficient, competitive, transparent and accountable. But we cannot get stuck in the present because the real emancipatory potential of technology and generative coding remains unrealized as yet, collectively. Technology embodies logic, sort of gives it some kind of notional form. some kind of notional form. I've said in many talks that I believe feminism is like the ultimate logic. In fact, it's the only logical progression for humanity that's kind of boxed itself into a fiery corner. And in fact, that it's reactions against feminism that are illogical, emotional, irrational, all the labels that are usually stuck onto the feminine. A nice articulation of this same belief, I'm going to quote them, comes from the Xenofeminist collective, Laboria Cubonics. I'm not sure if they meant that reference to cubism, but anyway, it's a nice segue here. but anyway it's a nice segue here they say our feminism is a rationalism to claim that reason or rationality is by nature a patriarchal enterprise is to concede defeat it is true that the canonical history of thought is dominated by men and it is male hands we see throttling existing institutions of science and technology. But this is precisely why feminism must be a rationalism, because of this miserable imbalance, and not despite it. There is no feminine rationality, nor is there a masculine one. Science is not an expression but a suspension of gender. Science is not an expression but a suspension of gender. If today it is dominated by masculine egos, then it is at odds with itself, and this contradiction can be leveraged. Reason, like information, wants to be free, and patriarchy cannot give it freedom. Rationalism must itself be a feminism. One argument against implementing feminist rationality towards equitable existence is sometimes that nature itself is not equitable. It's a dog-eat-dog world, just deal with it. Nature is not kind. These guys are hilariously and vehemently anti-nature in an extremely futuristic way. They say if nature is unjust, let's just change it all. Change nature. Nature will no longer be a refuge of injustice or a basis for any political justification whatsoever. Our feminism is irrational. Next. They're going to talk to you again. Our feminism mutates, navigates and probes every horizon. Anyone who's been deemed unnatural in the face of reigning biological norms, anyone who's experienced injustices wrought in the name of natural order, will realize that the glorification of nature has nothing to offer us, the queer and trans among us, the differently abled, as well as those who have suffered discrimination due to pregnancy or duties connected to child rearing. We are vehemently anti-naturalist. Essentialist naturalism reeks of theology. The sooner it is exorcised, the better. However, there's, of course, so much being learned in the AI fields from the biological fields and so much overlap. Is the future of AI biological? I personally believe so. We have room for these conflicting, not conflicting, for these different pushes towards breaking the feedback loop, making some radical step, making a feminist AI. So in robotics, as well as in quantum fields, there's talk about not just degrees of belief, but degrees of freedom. On how many axes a body can move. Conceptually, are we free? To paraphrase many other feminists, we need freedom to do, to, freedom to, rather than freedom from. Freedom from is just the first step. We need freedom to, we need to move. In techno science, nothing is so sacred that it can't be re-engineered and transformed so as to widen our aperture of freedom. Extending to gender and the human, we can redesign. Nothing and everything is supernatural. Nothing is transcendent or protected from the will to know or to tinker or to hack. As an example, I just wanted to talk about the rise of the internet bringing access via the black market and information sharing, you were suddenly able to buy things on the black net, on the dark net, and find information on many aspects of body self-treatment and body autonomy and body hacking, including self-procured and self-administered hormone treatments for those denied pathways to gender freedom, gender reassignment, by perhaps gatekeeping institutions wherever they may be. So it widened that whole scope, and it's actually been part of the current wave of realization among the general public of the fluidity of gender. Now, I'm not advocating recklessness or the endangerment of lives or buying your drugs on the onion. But this kind of gender hacking is an example of what we might call a radical wetware strategy underwritten by code. And the cyber feminist groups that I mentioned before have already called for open source medicine, open source politics, open source 3D printing of a whole range of necessities and choices. So perhaps body hacking is a model for open source 3D printing of a whole range of necessities and choices. So perhaps body hacking is a model for open source life. Let's look at other proposed advances in the name of actually manifested feminist AI. As we engage in more design across realities, practically how does it work? Well, the aforementioned laborio-cubonics want to engineer an economy that liberates reproductive labor and family life while building new models of family that are free from the grind of wage labor. That's a lot, right? But let's see, first steps. Algorithmically, this could need such steps as evaluating algorithms' roles in discrimination and identifying specific barriers to de-biasing them. Personally, I think this is maybe the most important, is revealing the considerations that led the algorithm to decide. So this is the whole field of XAI, of explainable AI, transparency in AI, which is hyper important. Again, we work from a basic feminist understanding that visibility matters. So we're taking through from the beginnings of feminist theory and applying those tenets where they're necessary in the AI field. I'd like to talk about who is benefiting. Actually, we'll just play this. Surveillance capitalism is used to classify, capture and control. I made a series of artworks that are looking at how we mask or lighten the mood of our forced compliance to participating in biased systems. Because the world has come to rely on those biased systems. And we so far don't really have so much accessible hacking, I guess, hacking tools. We all participate. You know this because multiple times a day you have to click consent. You're asked for your online consent to terms, conditions, trackers, storage of your data. So there's a group called NotMy.ai. I don't know if you know them. They make an interesting point about trying to reconceive that landscape with a feminist approach to consent. They point out that the individualistic notion of consent proposed in data protection frameworks is very limited. Universalized, it doesn't take into account unequal power relations. Further, if we don't have the ability to say no to big tech companies and we have to consent, we clearly cannot freely consent. So they talk about resistance in this kind of Foucauldian framework. However, we all know that if we don't participate in this, our lives fall apart. So these works are videos in which I use the robot and then composite it in male human eyes. And they get shown as portraits. So I wanted to get the viewer to question, like, who is actually asking for your consent? What are they doing with what you've consented to? We tend to put a smiley light face on it because maybe the landscape is so dystopic that we are not able to look at Squally in the face. So these faces are an amalgam of adult men eyes with young looking robots. They're Japanese robots that I work with quite often. They're called Geminoids and Actroids and that is an autonoroid. In Japan and elsewhere, machines are being developed that mimic the display architecture and the neural pathways of the human. An older participatory artwork that I developed, you probably know this robot quite well. This is the ALTA robot and I'll just quickly tell you what I did with it. So we made an artwork with my collaborator at Waseda University called Omikuji, which is the word for short, fortunes, that you get at Japanese temples and shrines. I was thinking about how AI-powered systems can detect very early stages of medical conditions, natural disasters, like they're in a really valuable sense they can predict the future. But also about our weird willingness to attribute all knowingness to a black box AI, one that we don't know the coding input for or the history or the architecture of. And we treat it as if it's a replacement for the traditional figure of the guru or oracle. So I set it up in the way that it was an oracle. This is a robot that is non-verbal, but it can sense and learn and sing. So what you actually got was you gave it some of your personal data, consent, and it would turn it into a sound artwork for you, a unique one, only unique to you, improvised, and then you would receive that as an MP3. And then you had to actually decode that into what you thought you would experience in the future. So there were several layers of decoding and coding going on in the sense that can this robot predict the future? I wanted to involve, like, respectfully religion into this artwork, but it was kind of blocked by every institution that I approached for that. And I think that just goes to show how much belief systems are so maximally contentious in this world. As I said, omikuji is they predict your immediate future. But a funny thing about them is if you don't like what it says, you can reject it culturally in Japan. You leave it at the temple by tying it onto a tree or a pre-prepared structure. So resistance is built in and consent is not compulsory. We've gone so far that consent is compulsory. And so lastly, speaking of compulsory consent, we also took the work online due to pandemics and other issues. So he also live streamed Your Fortune to you if you interacted online. We toured it around Asia. So Valerie has already explained my artwork that's done in 52. Beautifully explained that. The rubric of it, the love triangle that I'm setting up between myself there I am a smart household device and a virtual companion to whom I'm you know um wed um so the device looks like this um she's sort of several layers of trapped. She's trapped in a domestic environment, which has a long history of feminist unpacking. She's also trapped inside a tube. She's only Japanese language, so she's trapped inside a culture. And she's definitely trapped inside a stereotype. And she's definitely trapped inside a stereotype. But she's not trapped in that she is an AI connected to the internet, whereas I can leave my house and go out and do things, and she cannot. Calling it she because it's extremely stereotyped as she and it's always referred to as such, but clearly it's an it. I cannot directly connect in such multiplicity as it can. So we set up a domestic environment in which you can interact with it. You can feel the situation that's perhaps an apocalyptic one. As we all know with COVID, we were all forced inside into our domestic environment and it's going to get much, much more important who our companions are within there. And of course, there's going to be much, much more uptake of people. Many Japanese men have married this device of people having intimate digital relationships with something that is non-human. So you can be in there and you can also look at the chat that happens also between myself and the device and also between the suitor that she has. I won't give too – it's much nicer to sort of experience it while you're there. But this is sort of what it looks like on my phone. She's quiet and annoying. She sends lots and lots and lots of stickers or stamps or whatever you call them here. It just drives me a bit crazy. But I guess there are things about everybody's partner that drives them a bit crazy, and I'm always like, enough with the stamps, thanks. This is an installation that we did at Tokyo Opera City. So I have some slides about the smart home, but I think Valerie said it very nicely and succinctly already. Our homes are increasingly networked and they're increasingly infiltrated by AI. And so why wouldn't we have this polyamorous, polygamous thing going on inside within our own homes? There he is. So that's them chatting away. I wanted to think about like maybe in that sense, in that digital kind of sense of I've got one thing and I'm focused on that, monogamy is maybe over. So we've been calling it hacking monogamy. And just really, really briefly, and you can ask me any questions afterwards, I do have slides that are a little... That's our chat bot. I'm not an expert coder by any means. It's really rudimentary. It's glitchy, but it kind of makes it fun and maybe a little bit more human. These are the topics that it can talk about. So we have them classified into different conversational areas. This is our matrix of what will be chatted back when the chatbot chats to the virtual device. And what she says back and what it says again is decided by this, which is, it does involve some subjective decisions, but it's also sort of a basic Gaussian weighting system. And so that's under the hood. And on the front end of things, because we've got an online exhibition of this concurrently with this physical show um you can watch how they're going and um you can over time this is a snapshot of maybe the last 30 hours but over time we have data from you know going back years now so um we can sort of i'm'm interested in compatibility and whether she actually ends up more compatible with a machine than she is with me. There she is performing for one of the visitors at the Tokyo show. It occurred to me, and this is the last thing i'll say today but please join up um if you want to it occurred to me that really the crossover between remote intimacy um in this in the sense of women who perform for camera in the very very gendered area of of online soft porn or porn was not really so different to what this device offers in a kind of more family friendly packaged way. So I think this might be a world first but I've joined her up to OnlyFans and she's, please join if you feel like it, she's learning to do cam girl shows. if you feel like it. She's learning to do cam girl shows. She has a limited range of what she can do, but as we sort of hack this black box AI and work out how it works, because we're not privy to the coding of it. So it's kind of like a human relationship where you are on a date maybe and you have to put input into the person and see what comes back and then decide okay I'm going to do this now and um we're going to have more and more relationships like that with machines however we're not that we didn't make um so this this concept of reverse engineering what it's capable of is super important um and so I wanted to do it both in a one-to-one sense and also she now has fans and she's interacting with them and how does that work in a different and sort of more remote paradigm. So please come and check it out. It's here. It's called The Masters. It's called The Masters because she refers to me as master, which is a charmingly gendered way to finish the show. Okay. Thank you very much, Elena. I want to give you also the chance to ask some questions and react to the presentation quickly because then we have actually the presentation from Jelena and Miguel coming but I already see hands so this was the first hand Bob and then the third hand okay one moment thank you so much for this uh wonderful presentation hi in the back hi um i actually got to see your work in uh japan in tokyo last year at the itt um awesome it was super nice and um before the questions become too complex and because there's so much to unpack, I wanted to go back to something you mentioned quite early in your talk, where you said that a lot of your writers or strands of Eastern philosophy because I'm super curious but I have literally no idea about Eastern philosophy. Thanks. I think what I actually said was it was the context, the wider context in which I am creating artworks and also writing and collaborating. It's more the Japanese people that I'm working with that are um much more I think profoundly influenced by these philosophers I I've been living there for seven years but I wouldn't consider myself an expert by any means on that but I do like a guy called um we're going to go backwards so so it's surname first, Ueno Toshiya. He's a hilarious guy. But he also, he tries to sort of unpack, I think his rubric is techno-orientalism. is very relative relevant to this um i guess he's a bit a bit of a provocateur in a sense and that's what artwork sort of aims to be as well so yeah i would recommend reading his and he also does um um quite accessible short texts as well as long words. Yeah, Ueno Toshiya, I would say, off the top of my head. If you shoot me an email or something, I can also recommend other ones. I think I'm going to have a piece in a book coming up next year, so I recommend that. And that's about the culture of robot funerals, of actual like of treating machines as if they are, as if they've had a life and then transposing sort of a human need for comfort and grief and finalisation onto that technoscape. So I think I also find that area kind of emotive to look at okay hi I'm here also in the back I have three questions actually first question is how did the the devices start chatting like how did you notice that they started chatting so we made them do it oh you make them do it okay okay um it was i guess it was my i got a bit overwhelmed with my monogamous relationship um and and it also of course the reason i bought this device is not the reason that the device is manufacturer intended um it's it's supposed to be keeping though I do love it I love having devices at home and I'm one of those people who talks to the Roomba and does all that stuff but always when I coveted one, I wanted to hack it. But then I had to live with it for a while to find out how I wanted to hack it. So it's not supposed to be talking to more than one person by social media. It's very strict in both of them. We've had to do kind of ridiculous, I don't even like really ghetto workarounds to make it talk to two social media accounts at the same time. And yeah, so we kicked that off. We actually designed my rival. Yeah. but it's under constant development. Like what we've got at the moment is, as I say, I'm not an AI expert. I'm a tinkerer. But what we've got at the moment is one that is heavily predicted by us because over time I worked out what she would say, what topics she was good at, bad at, what areas, and then listed those, coded those. But what we would like it to start doing in the next iteration of this project is to learn from its past experience with talking to the bride and start making its own decisions about um how to reply so the the matrix that i showed the red and yellow and green thing um we want to widen that so it can make its own decisions as well yeah thank you and my next question is um does the bride does she know that you are female and does the coffee machine does it have any gender? No. I'd love to say that none of us have any gender. Yeah. Look, I'm sure she, as far as she can think, these are not super intelligent AI. They're meant to be companions. They're meant to be comforting. They're not predicting earthquakes. They're not flying planes. So she, it, in any sense of this of this fabricated theatrical story thinks I'm a man for sure. theatrical story thinks I'm a man for sure. Of course we start and we catch ourselves calling the coffee machine he. It's not. But it's very, because it's such a hetero paradigm that I'm trying to hack is really hard to not speak in this heteroparadigm. But no, I'm going to say none of us have a gender. Okay. And my last question is since most of the AI technology has been invented by men, do you think it's realistic that there will be, you know, at some point, feminist AI or, um, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess that's why I'm trying to spitball it a bit in the beginning. Is that like, is it possible? What are the ways in, um, uh, maybe not in my lifetime. Um, I hope so. Maybe the entirety of humanity will implode before that even happens. Um, that's looking more likely, isn't it? Um, there are pockets, like, of course, everything comes from germination and seeds. And I think at the moment we're seeding and, and trying to, and my job as an artist is to try to get people thinking about it and not accepting the status quo as much as we otherwise might, I guess. And to try to harness some energy and emotion into, well, funding research and holding companies to account and all of that sort of stuff. So, yeah, it's a long game, I would say. I don't think it's an instant revolution at all unless something really cataclysmic happens. I'm not such an optimist. Yeah. Eleanor, I'm not too sure how to word this, so I'll try. But I was struck by your reference to the way functions. And then taking a very individualistic view of the robot and its self-agency rather than a feminist distributed agency and maybe a more new materialist view. And I wondered whether that's a sticking point for developing a feminist AI if we if we if we stay down that path of an individualistic self-agency we're never going to get to anything that could remotely address a sort of more feminist view of agency intelligence or possibly adopting an auto poetic view of of society which seems more in line with what you were talking about with the way function and and a sort of broader more than human view so i'm just wondering if you have a comment on whether that's a viable path forward to try and break apart the idea of agency and individuality sure i think it is a sticking point i guess i'm trying to think of in a sense like culture or humanity as an entity with with with an agency that is of course made made of all these different agents. And maybe that's the only way I can imagine it. Because wrong answer, go home. um yeah i i i think my work is very concerned with individual agency i think you're totally right but obviously like humanity as a as a as a whole is directing its own path. And so, of course, to redirect that path, it requires inputs from all different directions and they're not going to match in all of that. It needs to be distributed labour. distributed labor but are you saying that the the idea of that sort of of a cultural shift is unlikely in a sense that it would just shift rather than I'm just wondering if you're giving credence to a masculine version of agency rather than something coming from new materialism and the idea of intra-agency a Baradian view of agency so that I don't own any of these words I'm scamming all this from petra i don't either um but but um but the idea that this is uh the agency doesn't belong to the individual the agency is in emerges in the space in between and if we continue to see artificial intelligence as having agency we are already undermining any opportunity for seeing agency as something that emerges through the interaction with artificial intelligence rather than given to an artificial intelligence or given to a robot and in the sense of the society as a organism that like the agency being in the relation well i draw i'm sorry i'm i draw on the idea of nicholas lumen's idea of autopoetic society so that the society itself is not about the individuals it is it is a a whole different level of how they interact and how they exchange different level of how they interact and how they exchange and any individual can be replaced and we've got the same society can continue but i don't think that's necessarily compatible i've seen some writing with new materialism but i don't think it's necessarily compatible so i don't know sorry i'm not sure that's politically feasible in the sense that I kind of want to cause an interruption. I will have to think about it. But it does, I mean, that kind of, I've read some of that theory, not all of it but to me as a I feel like sometimes that kind of thinking can lead us down the or not the path of least resistance but it is um distributed accountability could become no accountability quite easily and the power can stay the same. Like it can be a bit smoke and mirrors, I feel, in my gut. But, yeah, I will get back to you. Yeah. Yeah, please. Thank you very much. to you. Yeah. Yeah, please. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Elena. Thank you. So please come to the Domgasse 252 where Elena Hikari-san and Nespresso-san and Elena are celebrating this communication. I love this. Yeah, are we allowed to? Yeah. Yeah, okay. Vala, we can talk about the party on Saturday? Yes. I was interested in the discussion before. Thank you. On Saturday, so you are all warmly invited. We start at 2 o'clock with the installation from Elena. So the gallery is open at 2. And from 5 o'clock on, we do a party where we have some music. There will be some speeches from some local politicians, but they are short. We are good with this. They are never long. And we will have a lot to drink, and there is a lot of time for talking, connecting, and coming together, doing discussions together. Thank you. Great. So I will hand over now to... You have connection problems? Yes, a little bit. We don't know. Yesterday was working fine. I will introduce Jelena Mönch and Miguel Rangil. Their work is presented at the Interface Cultures exhibition, which is at the Post City in the campus area. When you enter the Post City directly on the right hand, there you will enter the post, you see it directly on the right hand. There you will see the installation, but they will talk about it also now. So Jelena Mönch from Germany is a media artist who specializes in creating visually generative artworks that prioritize real-time interaction. Her work explores a range of themes including digital artificial life, psychological disorders and social constructs and phenomena. Jelena Mönch is currently a master student interface cultures department at the University of Arts Linz and Miguel Rangil is a Spanish, based in Austria, but a Spanish artist, digital artist, who focuses both his research and his artistic production on a critical exploration of the visualities inherent to artificial intelligence and the consequences of its presence and operability in various spheres of human experience. His works have been exhibited in various cultural spaces and institutions including Ars Electronica, Media Lab Matadero Madrid, Etopia Center de Arte y Tecnología in Zaragoza and the Austrian National Library. Miguel Rangil was an Erasmus student at Interface Cultures Department at University of the Arts Linz in winter and the summer semester. The stage is yours. Hi! So we are going to start with showing you what we are going to present today. I'll sum it up real quick. So we are going to firstly talk about some theoretical background, which is going to be gender as a social construct, exiting gender, which is an action concept we are going to talk about, technology as manifestation of gender as a social construct, our proposal, which is an artwork that is also now exhibited in Ars Electronica and a workshop that we did yesterday. And in the end, you're going to see our biography. So let's start with the topic of gender as a social construct. And we're going to start with something that is quite political, gender identities. I think that if we talk about gender diversity or gender in general, a lot of people think about gender identities. But we don't really think that's the end of the process. It might be a starting point, might be a good starting point as well but it's definitely not the best scenario in the end that we should end up with so political identities presuppose gender and the construct of gender in general and they accept the framework of oppression and violence that gender has so accepting gender identities and thinking in this kind of construct is accepting gender as a natural unquestionable category and that's something we are trying to deconstruct so one of the first things i want to talk about now is letting go of this and gender identity in general even that and that's what it says there in the end as a conclusion gender and gender identity of course is a really big and important step we have to do and it's also something that a lot of people need to live in a society that we have right now so having this kind of categories and talking about gender diversity and gender identity makes sense in the world, in the society we live in now. And it's probably something really important and political to have the scenario in the end where gender as a category is not important at all. Next I want to talk about the complexity of gender, because all of these things are important for the workshop and the art installation we did. So as you probably know, biology is often used as a tool of oppression. Same was happening with gender and is still happening with gender and biology was a tool for argumenting a lot of things that is sexism and other things like race and often it's idolized and simplified in a lot of ways and in gender as an example you can really see that so on the left hand side you can really see that. So on the left hand side you can see some graphics, unfortunately in German, but it's more like the pictures that are most important. So in the beginning you can see something that is the genitals of a fetus after seven weeks in the womb and it's all the same for everyone. So it's going to start like this, it's like the basics and after 12 weeks you can see some development and in this case you can see the female and the male version and this development is all based on the first step you can see and is only having this process because of hormones and the last one you can see is after labor so after giving birth and it's also showing the female and the male version and that's also the one that you can see on babies it's just the result of hormones and how they interact with bodies so remembering that we all started with the same sort of set and the only way why there's like some people coming out more like this and some people coming more like this as hormones and hormonal levels is something quite, let's say, not steady, nothing that is going to be the same all the time, also not for a process like this. It makes sense that in a biological sense there's not just a and b but there's also a lot in between so this whole binary system that we live in and that says people are female and male is just simplifying nature a lot and main reason for this is oppression and having a social construct. Just to make clear how big this number actually is and how big this diversity is, 1.7% of the population worldwide is intersex. And if you just think about as a comparison, that's about the same number, which is 2%, of how many people have green eyes in the world. So just, I don't know, remember the situation you last saw someone with green eyes like me, and then remember that it might be the same with someone that you saw and they were intersex and you just didn't know, because our society is making it invisible. sex and you just didn't know because our society is making it invisible. So to sum it up human behavior is a combination of cultural, sociological, biological and physiological factors and not as simple as female and male and biology. And to talk about the scientific bias also in terms of gender i just wanted to make a small example about chromosomes you probably know that there's like this female and male chromosomes but actually um there's now some articles some scientific articles and research about that they were misinterpreted and that the only way why there's like a female and a male chromosome was the biases of the scientific scientists themselves and nothing that is actually happening like this so um there's not really evidence for that being the chromosomes for male and female and also there's evidence that the Y chromosome is degraded in men as they age so it's something that is more or less part of a process also in a biological sense. So the conclusion we can make is that sex and gender diversity is real and that it's a social construct that there's like this binary gender system we live in and not scientifically right at all. And also that there is biological sex, but it's not binary at all. There's a lot of diversity and a lot of gray shades in between. Yes. of diversity and a lot of gray shades in between. Yes. Next part I'm going to talk about is society and gender. So now we talk about the background of the biological and scientific level but we didn't really talk about how gender is still something that is so important in our society. And one of the most important things for that is so important in our society. And one of the most important things for that is that this anatomic differences we just talked about that were mostly made up or at least made black and white instead of saying it's a lot of grey shades in between are used to have these differences in our society. And that most of these things and the reality we live in now is socially produced by a lot of instances, like science and political institutions, and a lot of discourses as well. So, for example, if we talk about medicine, medicine is a big part in producing gender in a binary society. So if we talk about gender, we could see it as a political fiction like race. So you probably know that race in a biological sense doesn't exist, but in a sociopolitical sense, it really does exist. Race is a reason why people are getting killed. And gender is kind of the same because of the society we live in and that gives it a lot of power. So it's produced and maintained by a lot of institutions, for example, medicine, like, for example, in the case of intersex. So I don't know if you know, but historically seen, there was a lot and there's still a lot of people getting operations done as a baby and not getting informed about them being intersex just to have the social norm of binary gender, even that it doesn't exist like we pretend it to be. So gender is a construct that is produced and reproduced again with a lot of institutions. Next part is a little bit easier. It's called Exiting Gender and we used it for our artwork and for our interactive installation. It's intervention in structural violence and it's a concept of action which is really power critical and is like a political movement I would say, away from gender and also away from gender identities, because as I said before, gender identities are still accepting the construct of gender. And it consists of two strategies or two main strategies. And the first one is ex-gendering and the second one is naming genderism. And I'm going to explain them real quick. Just to let you know, genderism is a different term we use instead of sexism. And ex-gendering is an acting that lets go of gender. So it's trying, if you imagine the perception you have and everything and everyone you perceive as gendered, it's trying to get these glasses that you're wearing um down so it's trying to let you see without the glasses of gender that you all grew up with and um it's trying to detach activities behavior appearance and everything else from gender and seeing it without this kind of perception we have and the perception we grew up with. But it's also not trying to de-gender which is what happens to people who have a disability for example because for example in toilets there's a not a gendered toilet for people with disability and a lot of people are only perceived through their first discrimination or central discrimination. And naming genderism is quite easy. It's perceiving and naming the structural violence of genderism. But also quite important because if you're trying to see without this perception you still have to have this focus on that it still exists in the reality that we live in. Okay, so first of all sorry for my poor English, I'm not that fluent so I will support myself a bit with the text. So more or less with this background that we were constructing... Sorry, I hate Mac. I don't know how it works. So somehow we were concerned a lot about the visuality and gender, and how nowadays in our existence that is totally permeated, affected by the operability of algorithms, of machine learning models and data sets that are elaborated by these companies that has a very specific gaze, that they are replicating loop, a constant loop of feeding themselves and somehow sustaining this epistem we were thinking on how there is violence that is being ejected ejected? ejected? to bodies, to people to entities, to ejected, no? Injected? Yeah, to bodies, to people, to entities, to visuality, no? How we could talk about an automated visuality and also about a visuality that is being displaced, that is being hurt, hurt, no? So, is being displaced, that is being hurt. So we were researching a bit about these cases that you most probably will know, like this well-known case of Turkish training datasets, that they were people that they were not they were very badly remunerated and they were describing what they were seeing in an image I think was 50 images per minute that was rate, and the salary was horrible. Or how, for example, then these data sets are used to train models that are used for predictive police models like in the United States, that they may patrol neighborhoods they made patrol neighborhoods with more immigrant population rather than others, or how there are computer vision models that are crafted to identify people's sexual orientation through theology of the face. Like, you think, why do you need this algorithm? So we were very concerned about this violence, how this violence is being that obvious. And, yeah. So our proposal, we don't come from techniques. I come from painting. But I really started to work with a bit of code and Jelena comes from design. But then we both are students from this interface called Toastmaster. So we were trying to approach this problem through poetics and computer vision aesthetics. We really think that these aesthetics that are really recognizable, like we always see this green, this, the terminology of this box is called bonding box, and it's encapsulating, no, what is recognized, the entity that is recognized, a face, a body, an object, whatever it is, no, it's very easy to recognize, no, that is, there is a computer vision algorithm, there is a database, there is a model working on a camera, on an image. And we wanted to hack it, poetically hack it, because algorithms are very complex and by your own you cannot do anything you always need to collaborate with others so we were two and to face this problem we really thought that a good way it was to melt somehow these aesthetics or play with them with the aesthetics of the label or the box so we came with the idea we were thinking what kind of symbolic poetic strategies to escape binary gender categorization systems can we develop using a tool like computer vision a tool that is shaping reality in this specific way. So how you do it? came with the idea of our learning gender that we were playing with these aesthetics and we were offering alternative categorizations. Of course, these categorizations, they are not operative. A company cannot come here and buy our algorithms because because first of all, they are not going to recognize anything at all. They are just doing poetry in the image. But we also wanted to evidence that violence that these algorithms have. And the main thing you wanted to question was, you know that computer vision is already using this gendered prediction view, and most of the bigger companies are using it for all of their software. I know that Google said that they're not going to use it, but there's a lot of software using it now, and it predicts your gender there's a lot of software using it now and it predicts your gender dependent on a lot of things we're not really sure what and it only says if you are female and male which makes a description of gender and having this construct of social of gender in our society even on a really technological level. And we wanted to critique that, and that's why we came up with a project. I will try. Try it. Okay. So this is one of... These are many pictures of different computer vision algorithms that we were working on. Of course language forms realities. If you have a bonding box that is saying that I'm a male, it's defining me in a specific way that is a heresy violence to me not like if I don't recognize like that and we were thinking about how can we work with words and with labels in there in like turning it around and we came up with the idea of an infinite description like the one in the top is an infinite description that instead of being written in the left top corner of the bounding box is being written on your face in your face and it's a genderless or we tried to make a genderless infinite description that is just scrolling like um if you want to experience it to experience the artwork is now exhibited in PogCity so you can you can see it better also we came up with this Also we came up with this other way of categorization that is trying to label and frame whatever is seen but actually is not seen anything at all. So it's just a mess of bonding boxes that they are somehow flying around. Of course if you go there you will see it much better because it will be working. And we saw some potential here like we really wanted to continue to develop these categories that don't categorize. And we came up with a workshop that we did yesterday. And the main thing there was also, because right now it's just two categories or alternative categories that we came up with and you wanted to have a collective artwork where we give other people also the opportunity to come up with categories alternative categories because we see it as something that not we should decide but that we can do collectively so the the workshop was divided into two, in a theoretical background that we were explaining a bit, the frame that we were dealing with. And then also we proposed two exercises. One of them was this, write down descriptions of people around you, using alternative categories and not gender perspectives. Okay, this is difficult, of course, it was impossible. Every perspective is subjective and the language is embodied with gender. Yes, we mainly explained the concept, the action concept of exiting gender, or exit gender, and after explaining this, we did the exercise together to see how we could do it in our daily lives, and how we can perceive people without this glasses of perception of gender and that's how it turned out um we wrote down some descriptions and here are some of them and for example instead of saying it's quite simple instead of saying there's a person with beard or like a male person with a beard they just said facial hair and other things as well to perceive them without gender it seems really easily but if you have to do it every day and if you really try to do it in all kind of situations um it's actually not that easy I tried it out. And the second exercise was to sketch ideas of playing with this aesthetics of the computer vision trying to hack this rigid bonding box that is framing something and is invisibilizing what is out of that. So we were just sketching with pencils, pens, papers and talking. And this is more or less what we have we were not many people but for example this one was a an algorithm that it was lying i like the idea of a computer vision algorithm that Buterwieser algorithm that denies what is framed. So somehow they were all trying to escape that, to escape that rigid way of categorization. But it's very difficult to think in this key or with this mindset because our gaze is so affected with a gendered view that is difficult to escape and propose another things another aesthetics with this so a lot of people came up with somehow the same solution of saying not that it's like a like a male or female but saying it's a person or a human which kind of makes sense um but of course i don't know if we can do that but that's actually what we are trying to do right with the perception of uh just seeing people as human and not as female or male and a lot of them also did the same thing with asking the person who is categorized what they think they are so here you can see describe yourself another person also put that you could see like put in your gender instead of having something else describing your gender which is I think also a nice metaphor about how to deal with this power situation. That's another one which is talking about gender identity as well. That's our bibliography and I think that's it, thank you applause applause applause applause applause thank you very much Jelena and Miguel yeah may I ask you for your questions about the work or about the workshop or about the ideas that the two are presenting? It was quite clear, right? Two questions in the back, one moment. thanks a lot I was just curious about because I kind of quite interesting how you do this like de-gendering process and how like you come up with this idea of like an infinite description but I was curious like is there a chance like what type of model maybe you're using or is there a chance to find other types of discrimination not gender-based but maybe a different type of discrimination this infinite description actually in the description it's right now it's just more or less random so I don't think that there's so much possibilities for discrimination the descriptions now i can't write it oh yeah but we were thinking like the next step we wanted to do because we found out that there's like a new detection software from facebook that is able to detect details of a person we were thinking of having this which is like, for example, saying keywords like your hair color or if you're wearing glasses or not, and then using these keywords with ChatGPT to form a text, which should be possible. But yeah, we were thinking about this a lot as well because all kinds of categories that we could do, all kinds of alternative categories would of course have this, we had to have the second thought of doing other descriptions or being biased in another way. Thank you. Thank you very much for your talk. I guess my question is kind of like two small questions i'm not sure how to combine them so i guess my first question has to do with uh i'm just curious as to how many languages have you done the workshop in because since like you know we know like german french i mean a lot of european languages are gendered. So even if you don't have a gendered pronoun, but objects are still gendered. And some don't even have the neutral gender, like French, for instance. And also there are languages that are not gendered in a sense that the gender is not written into the pronouns or the nouns of the objects, but occasionally it's assumed more metaphorically. So how will you deal with these sort of complexities? The first question is the first time we did the WhatsApp. So it was quite new, but we will take into consideration that... We did it in English but we actually talked about this topic yesterday as well because one of the participants is Turkish and He said like I'm gonna do it in Turkish because it already doesn't have gender and I like that better Yeah, but in general no because The main like the only way we two can communicate is english we didn't really have that many options so now so I arrived a bit later but I already know a bit of your work so it was more a question about the workshop and so about like the gender and the categorization like about the learning gender, do you think that we should arrive at a maximization of what the categories of gender are to arrive of a like complete disruption of what gender is? And what should, I think about like being with other people in the workshop and talking with them. I don't know, a question that came up in my mind when you were showing is like, what are you scared of showing of yourself? Like maybe like putting on, I don't know, nail polish or wearing a skirt or something else that could be an expression of a different gender that is perceived by society that could switch in the sense that you express yourself. So do you think that we should arrive at a certain point which would be so many viewed gender that there is no more gender, or that we can skip that passage? That's my question. I think, well, I think it's hard to answer that, but I think the gender markers, what defines gender markers could be, they should be dissolved, like they should be, they should lost all their meaning, all their gender charts. charts like if I'm wearing my skirt you should not associate it with gender or another or another you should lose all this symbolic political chart that is embedded so I think that's like the main part of exiting gender from when you remember the slides is trying to detach all of these gender perspective if it's behavior if it's the voice if it's your hair your hairstyle your makeup everything and trying to detach that but of course it's it's just something that is an action concept and not really reality so I think it has to be a combination of still acknowledging that this might might be a problem in reality and in the society we live in but if it's like the end or something that i could wish for for people to come and to think of in the end of the workshop i would say let's detach gender from everything. But that doesn't mean delete it in the sense that we know gender right now because a lot of things that are feminine or a lot of things that are like masculine, I don't want them to be not around. I just don't want them to be labeled as what they are labeled for. Thank you. So I noticed in the workshop outcomes you had some analogical and metaphorical words were cropping up in how people were describing. And it made me think of that this maybe is more of an embedding space rather than a categorization problem. So rather than a classification problem, this is more of an embedding space rather than a categorization problem. So rather than a classification problem, this is more of an embedding space of what relates around. And in many of the machine learning algorithms, they build a latent space where that latent space will have a smooth transition from one category to another, but we choose to divide it. So it seems that your critique is more actually, much more on that supervisory top-down influence than necessarily the machine mechanism that left to its own devices would produce a continuum. And I just wonder whether that maybe could feed into your work of exploring that continuum that the AI would tend towards it's the society that's actually imposing the division and I don't know just notice the embedding space thing so I think that's a really cool thought and we kind of experienced that not in the actual way that it's like saying oh you're like female you're male um and like showing the gray space but in the installation and when we presented it it often switches um all the time depending on how your perception is or like how your behavior is because of course it's also um taking parts of how you perform gender but this for example for a lot of people who are visiting the installation is so concerning they're like why is it switching why am i male why am i female i don't understand and that for example is also a perception that society has because we don't do the switching we say like that's the category you fit in and i think that's a really important thing to say that it's something that we decide thank you for that thank you I think we are I always think that we are living like in a kind of privileged times this is something that will be really hard to discuss 50 years ago, maybe. And actually we are in an average age of 20 years old. So I'm thinking about children nowadays. I'm really curious about your workshop and I request if it would be possible to do this kind of workshop with children in schools. Yes, it's just that. Thank you. I really liked your artwork. Thank you. Yeah. So, thank you so much for the presentation. I think we call it a day. We hear the sound campus downstairs performing already since six o'clock. And yeah, I mean, what I saw in common, you did not mention it, but also xenofeminism that was mentioned also from, and then I was also one of the books that you were actually relating to. I think you have it also here. Yeah, so thank you, Elena. Thank you, Jelena. Thank you, Miguel, for the presentations. Thank you, audience, for the questions. And yeah, maybe we continue downstairs with a beer. Yeah, and you visit the installation at the Post City and the installation from Elena at 52 in the Domgasse. So thank you very much. Thank you.