Technodiversity

Studium Generale Rietveld Academie & Rietveld Uncut present a multi-day conference festival with talks, performances and screenings, and an exhibition of student works at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam: Technodiversity—Beyond Datafication and Digital Colonialism.

In the era of datafication and algorithms, big tech and governments extract information for profit and control, fostering “data colonialism” in digital capitalism. This transforms life into a tradeable resource, contributing to existing inequality and creating new power imbalances. Philosopher Yuk Hui’s technodiversity concept suggests that different knowledge systems, ideologies, political interests, economic forces, and cultural practices shape diverse technologies. These insights can empower us to control our data—embracing perspectives like no data, small data, indigenous data, more-than-human data, feminist data, queer data. To safeguard subjectivity, we must reconsider our relationships with data, challenging the extractive logic of contemporary regimes. At the intersections of bodies, identities, digital technologies, and activism, envisioning an embodied, potentially subversive data agency becomes crucial.

Karen Archey, Soft Machines: Technology and Material Impact: March 20
With: Ramon Amaro, Kate Cooper, Lila  Lee-Morrison, Natasha Tontey.

Borrowed from writer William S. Burroughs, the notion of the Soft Machine refers to the human body and its relation to control mechanisms. Examining advanced technology from a material perspective, a mixture of artists and theorists will speak about the personal and political implications of artificial intelligence, machine learning, eugenics, and data mining alongside notions of class, gender, race, modernism and colonialism. The speakers will underline how existing power structures from the past—often exploitative—complicate the experience of today’s technologies and digital cultures. The program will introduce critical concepts from visual culture and automated facial recognition technology, as well as a performative work by Kate Cooper and new videos by Natasha Tontey. 

Zach Blas, That Which Protects the Diverse: March 21
With: Shu Lea Cheang, Ricardo Dominguez, Isadora Neves Marques, Shaka McGlotten and Nelly Y. Pinkrah.

This day of the conference-festival engages philosopher Yuk Hui’s concept of technodiversity by staging an encounter with Caribbean philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant’s notion of the Diverse, that is, minoritarian existences on Earth relating through alterities that are unknowable and unpredictable to standardized, dominant orders. We will experience the Diverse’s technodiversity, a range of critiques and constitutions, protections and celebrations, that are anticolonial, antiracist, feminist, and queer, including presentations on indigenous futurism, computational hexes, viral love, opacity in cybernetics, and gendered robots and vampires. The program will also reckon with the institutionalization of diversity under the informatics of domination, questioning the very diversity of diversity today. Relating and resonating through Glissant’s opaque Diverse, the artists and scholars gathered here demonstrate how to create, use, dream, and think with technodiversity, in code and text, image and sound, performance and protest, seeking protection and liberation from the informatics of domination, but also alliance and pleasure along the way.

Taka Taka, Data-ball: March 22
With:  Taka Taka, Angelina Loqui, Jennifer Hopelezz, PrEP, data, Mr European POZ: Eric the drag king, dance, Aryelle Freeman Hopelezz, Sabrina Houston †, Vogue-Nagato & Shirleen Miyake Mugler, Matrix, Papaya Kuir, collective, testing centre, Vinny von Vinci, Drag MX science, Drag King Hellena. One hour, four stories, ten performances with numbers. About HIV/AIDS, mourning, PrEP prevention technology activism, wild data & drag-sharing-actions as ways of doing things for each other. End of violence; creation of joy.   

Framework
Studium Generale Rietveld Academie, an exploratory theory program aimed at all departments, open to the public. Head of program: Jorinde Seijdel. Coördinator: Jort van der Laan. Rietveld Uncut, Departments and individual students develop projects in relation to the theoretical frameworks of Studium Generale. Curators: Tarja Szaraniec and Tomas Adolfs.