DSI Lecture Series | Data Heresy: A Queer Incomputable Tale

In this talk, Elisa Giardina Papa will outline the theoretical and archival research which informs two of her experimental video installations, Cleaning Emotional Data and “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale. Presenting images she collected while working as a “data cleaner” for various AI systems, she will address the ways in which machines are disciplined and trained to see. Tracing, bounding-boxing, and labeling are key operations used to teach machines to separate Data from data, signal from noise, and orderly things from disorderly ones. They are also, Giardina Papa argues, the onto-epistemological operations of modern imperial and colonial conquest. To address AI’s normative impulse to divide and classify, create hierarchies and produce difference, we need to understand machine vision not only as a “new” tool of extractive capitalism but also, more importantly, as one of the many tools of a recursive hegemonic ordering of the world. Ultimately, this talk will be an invitation to reflect on modes of seeing otherwise which remain radically unruly, irreducible, and incomputable.

Elisa Giardina Papa is an artist and scholar, Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. Her research-based art practice seeks forms of knowledge and desire that have been lost or forgotten, disqualified, and rendered nonsensical by hegemonic demands for order and legibility. Working across Artificial intelligence-based projects, large-scale video installations, experimental films, and writing, she draws attention to those aspects of our lives that remain radically incomputable.

Her work has been exhibited at the 59th Biennale di Venezia (The Milk of Dreams), the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA’s Modern Mondays), the Whitney Museum (Sunrise/Sunset Commission), Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin, ICA and Frieze London, BFI London Film Festival, Vienna Secession, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt (HKW) Berlin, 6th Buenos Aires Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento, Seoul Mediacity Biennale 2018, the Center for Contemporary Art Tashkent, Uzbekistan, M+ Hong Kong, among others. Her latest art book, Leaking Subjects and Bounding Boxes: On Training AI (Sorry Press, 2022), documents the methods currently used to teach Artificial intelligence to capture, classify, and order the world and presents a collection of images that exceed computation. Forthcoming essays include the foreword for Informatics of Domination (Duke University Press, 2024).

Elisa Giardina Papa co-founded the artist collective Radha May. Alongside Indian artist Nupur Mathur and Ugandan artist Bathsheba Okwenje, they collaborate on performances and art installations that uncover hidden histories and marginalized sites, examining their intersections with gender, sexuality, and colonialism. She holds a Ph.D. in Film and Media from the University of California, Berkeley, and has previously held positions at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and the Rhode Island School of Design.

We want to make our events accessible to all participants. This event will be a hybrid event with both a physical meeting space and an online meeting space.

Please register in advance for the online Zoom Webinar here: https://bit.ly/3ArOQz8

Please register for the physical meeting space at the University of Michigan’s Central Campus: https://myumi.ch/pkrey

CART will be provided. If you anticipate needing accommodations to participate, please email Eric Mancini at dsi-administration@umich.edu. Please note that some accommodations must be arranged in advance and we encourage you to contact us as soon as possible.