Public Thought : CCC Publix seminar with Ramon Amaro

Tuesday, March 5, 2019 at 7pm
HEAD, Boulevard Helvétique 9
Seminar room CCC, room 27, 2nd floor
1205 Genève

Ramon Amaro : Engineering race : Statistics, Data and the design of a racialised future

The crisis of data and the growing dissent toward algorithmic interruptions in daily life are part of a larger crisis of enumeration and the engineering of individual and collective social bodies. It is widely thought that our present desire for data finds it origin in contemporary modes of computation, namely machine learning, deep learning and artificial intelligence technologies. To the contrary, the conditions for these technologies were set forth by Western fixations on classification, data aggregation and mathematics. In this intervention, I will discuss the role that symbolic mathematics have played in the production of truth. Ultimately, I seek to problematise the contemporary space of the digital as always already predicated on the wider logics of human sorting and racialisation. I argue that we must return to mathematics and the engineering of individual and collective bodies in order to address contemporary forms of algorithmic oppression.
 

Ramon Amaro is a lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London and a researcher in the areas of machine learning, the philosophy of mathematics, black ontologies, and philosophies of being. Amaro completed his PhD in Philosophy at Goldsmiths and holds a Masters degree in Sociological Research from the University of Essex and a BSe in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

CCC Public Thought operates as an umbrella for public seminars, transversal movements, discussions and mobile displays of the CCC Research-based Master of the Visual Arts Department at HEAD – Genève. Under this umbrella, the 2018-19 Public Seminar engages in a set of approaches by artists, theorists and editors to diagnose or relate to the ‘datalogical turn’ (Patricia T. Clough): the question whether the affirmative powers of ‘data-behaviorism’ (Antoinette Rouvroy) influence our social lives, manipulate political tendencies, create new paradigms of domination and confront the human with its own impotence is insufficient. Because, we (humans) are in the middle of the muddle. We are the subject of research that we cannot control. Our bodies are fields of extraction, our brains produce food for data, and our thoughts are overwhelmed by the speed of trolls. It feels as if we – humans – are gasping the last breaths to catch up with the speed of hate producing hate and competing with the amazingly looking glitch of a YouTube-video-download. How do we cope with the fact that data does not need the human while operating humans’ lives on multiple scales? How can research practices disentangle, disarm and unfold a computational ontology of cognition and science in relation to art-making, ignorant knowledge, and long-term thoughts?
Committed to contemporary research practices by the means of art under conditions of planetary transformations, the CCC Public Thought invites everyone to join a public moment of ongoing debates at the CCC Research-based Master.

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Public Thought : Séminaire Public CCC avec Ramon Amaro
© Image issue de la page 133 de “Statistical studies in the New York money-market; preceded by a brief analysis under the theory of money and credit, with statistical tables, diagrams and folding chart" (1902).