Antonia Majaca is a curator and writer based in Berlin who will teach one short intense seminar this semester at HfG Karlsruhe. She leads the FWF-funded research project ‘Incomputable’ at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Graz University of Technology. She recently co-curated Parapolitics – Cultural Freedom and the Cold War at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin and teaches theory at the Dutch Art Institute.

Aesthetics and Politics for the Age of Algorithms: A Feminist Critique of AI

This seminar will explore the relationship between gender and learning machines. We will start by exploring the modes in which gender is inherently ‘inscribed’ in the technological systems of AI, and ask how gendered binaries are fundamentally implicated in the genealogy of the ‘Entscheidungsproblem’ and how they are continuously reproduced by the AI computational systems.

We will think through the crucial implication of the paradigm of incomputablity introduced by Alan Turing in 1936. If incomputability revealed not simply the ‘crisis of reason’, but also demonstrated that reasoning had to include the unknown within the procedure of thinking, what are the ramification of the paradigm of incompatibility on the ‘universal subject of western knowledge’?

How does incomputability destabilise not only the axiomatic historical and epistemic schemes and what does it ‘do’ to the political aspects of its ‘truth production’?  If the Universal Turing Machine demonstrated not only that truths could become machine-programmable, but, crucially, that computational procedures could lead to conclusions not contained by the premises, it also opened a way of updating ‘rational thinking’ with and through machines.

In this seminar, we will consider AI as  ‘technological research entities’ modelled upon diverse aspects of human intelligences and consider the notions of  randomness, uncertainty and incomputibility in diverse fields to arrive at a sketch for a differentiated and reparative feminist epistemology and aeshetico-political project of AI.  With it, by way of theory and examples from contemporary art, we will examine not only the norms and protocols of Western rationality – together with its apparent ’gender blindness’ and its claims of neutrality, but also try to think beyond its contradictory hegemonic (binary) cultural logic of intertwined techno-euphoria and techno-paranoia.

Time: 

Wednesday, June 12. 16:00-19:00 / Room 303
Thursday, June 13. 10:00-14.30 / Room 115

Everyone is welcome to join. Please contact Antonia Majaca (antonia.majaca [at] gmail.com) and Ariana Dongus (adongus [at] hfg-karlsruhe.de) for more information.