Veranstaltungsprogramm

Contemporary imaginaries of «smart» systems and infrastructures, artificial intelligence, and machine learning systems, often express the hope of alleviating or avoiding direct conflicts in the political sphere (at least the formal one) through technical means. This offers a series of questions about how population, territory, politics, and agency have been, and are being, articulated in relationship to calculation and governance. Furthermore, ubiquitous computing and smartness often engage fantasies of overcoming older ontologies of race, sex, gender, class, and nation, as well as histories of planning and socialism.

In this panel, we want to underline and discuss the fundamental dependencies subsisting between media technologies and political imaginaries and the political sphere. We will be examining notions of nature and evolution, histories of revolution through black thought and cybernetics, and the calculation of population, in order to begin asking how politics and political imaginaries are being transformed through large scale data sets and machine learning. We are concerned with the central place of sex and race in contemporary machine learning; we also seek to reimagine terms such as «freedom», «intelligence», communication, and democracy through historical and ethnographic treatment. Most importantly, we seek to examine how contemporary notions of technology, «smartness» , and data are reformulating and perhaps transforming ideas of territory, ecology, and the «human».

Today, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, transforming geopolitical conditions, and the climate crisis, the term “new normal” circulates throughout news outlets and social networks. This new normal is largely defined by a naturalization of precarity for some, the dramatic elevation of profit for others, and a demand for increased computation and automation to secure territory, population, and resources. Smartness and AI are the solutions and buffers to the impacts of a planet now understood as constantly in crisis and facing negative, if not apocalyptic, futures.

My intent is to briefly historically situate this “new” nature by tracing a history of the merged engagements between economics, artificial intelligence, ecology, and population management between the 1950’s- 1970’s. I will examine the concepts of resilience, adaptation and evolution, and their relationships to dependencies, within these fields to trace a genealogy of our contemporary “new normal” and what I label “the smartness mandate” that assumes ubiquitous computing and speculative financial practices are the routes to environmental and population security and risk management at a planetary scale.

Chandler, David

Cooper, Melinda, Jeremy Walker

Halpern, Orit, Robert Mitchell

Holling, C. S.

Murphy, Michelle

Orit Halpern is Full Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures and Societal Change at Technische Universität Dresden. Her work bridges the histories of science, computing, and cybernetics with contemporary studies of infrastructure, design, and urban planning. Her most recent book with Robert Mitchell (MIT Press) is titled the Smartness Mandate.

Borders depend on the work of policing and surveillance. One major area of reproducing borders is the rendering of borders through metrics. Departing from scholarship that considers how borders work and fail through the spectacular forms of border and migration policing, I look at the mundane administrative work of counting and classifying to analyze the dependencies between media technology and bordering. I consider the role of numbers as “quantum media” in the work of reproducing the nation-state order of borders. While often invisibilized classification and normalization of race, gender, and sexuality depend on their constant reproduction to become common sense and natural.

I analyze discourses and practices around production, use, and circulation of numbers in form of refugee quotas, allocation keys, and migration statistics. Analyzing the the statistical and social scientific rendering of migration and its transnational media circulation I demonstrate that numbers work to extend borders into and within the nation-state to regulate sexual and gendered subjects. I show that the production, use, and circulation of numbers are central for bordering practices such as the decreasing possibilities for family unification, the production of threatening Muslim and/or Arab male sexuality, the pathologizing of the migrant family, and state practices of family separation and detention. In this sense, numbers do the work of bordering through situating migrants as a racialized threat of biological and social contagion.

Bowker, G. C., Star, S. L.

de Genova, Nicholas

M. Murphy, Michelle

Spade, Dean

Wernimont, Jacqueline.

Dr. Michelle Pfeifer is postdoctoral fellow at the Chair of Digital Cultures at Technische Universität Dresden. Their research is located at the intersections of (digital) media technology, migration and border studies, and gender and sexuality studies and explores the role of media technology in the production of legal and political knowledge amidst struggles over mobility and movement(s) in postcolonial Europe.

The Haitian Revolution took place at the turn of the 18th century, from 1791 to 1804. It became a source and story of emancipation and resistance, of struggle for freedom and liberation. Most importantly, it also (re)presents an alternative history that undergirds the Western paradox of declaring the universal values liberté, égalité, fraternité and consequently universal rights – not universally. The industrial-scale forced mutation of peoples, of land and culture undoubtedly led to the invention of new languages, de- and reformations of modes of communication, and a relationality to said paradox and a world-to-come. Universal and for all.

By looking at the Haitian Revolution, its historiography (i.a. C.L.R. James, Glissant, Scott, Buck-Morss, Casimir) and predominant engagements with it by means of Black & Media Studies, I aim to reconfigure the terms in which we commonly think about the different embodied practices, relations and subjectivities that constitute it. History is always already mediated, and in this case it offers to shift, broaden and, at the same time, amend our understanding of «human» communication technologies. I will discuss them in their potentiality to reveal tales of society, communion and politics, which is to say as an organizing principle not only for what we consider to be media and technology but also in terms of media and technology's interdependency to a particular incarnation of the genre of the human (Wynter) that we still adhere to.

Glissant, Édouard

James, C. L. R.

McKittrick, Katherine

Scott, Julius S.

Wynter, Sylvia

Nelly Y. Pinkrah is a scientific associate at Technical University in Dresden with the Chair for Digital Cultures. She is interested in black studies, media & technology, poetics & politics, critical pedagogy & practice. Her doctoral thesis about Édouard Glissant, histories of technology and cybernetics is finished at Leuphana University Lüneburg.