Creative Imagination for an Ethical Web - TPAC 2020 breakout presentation
Facilitator: Lauren Lee McCarthy
Speakers: Shawné Michaelain Holloway, Ashley Jane Lewis, Mindy Seu, and Amelia Winger-Bearskin
This sessions invites panelists Shawné Michaelain Holloway, Ashley Jane Lewis, Mindy Seu, and Amelia Winger-Bearskin to reflect on their diverse practices and how each points us toward a vision of the future internet that is more ethical, equitable, and inclusive. We’ll talk about mentoring structures in open-source, the ethical tech machine learning framework ml5.js, creating the Cyberfeminism Index, the wampum.codes project cultivating technology based on Indigenous values, and bringing rhetorics of technology and sexuality into tools for exposing structures of power. Brief presentations will be followed by open discussion among panelists and Q&A with the breakout participants. This session is curated and moderated by Lauren Lee McCarthy of the p5.js project.
Minutes (including discussions that were not audio-recorded)
Transcript
Lauren McCarthy: Thank you.
I'm Lauren Lee McCarthy.
I'm here on behalf of the processing foundation and the P5JS project.
We're really happy to be able to put together a few sessions features panels where we're thinking about the web and things that we want to see in the future and hope that this can offer some discussion up for the W3C conference.
This panel I'm excited to start with and it's basically trying to think about where are we with the internet right now and where would we like to see it go?
What's the future internet that we hope to see that's more ethical, equitable and inclusive.
A lot of the panelist here wear many different hats.
They are writers, artist, software developers and community organizers and educators and all those things rolled into one.
I feel like it's important to have artist and designers as part of this conversation to push on the boundaries of what we imagine for these technologies that we're building.
So I'm so honored and excited to introduce you to these panelist.
We have Mindy Seu, Ashley Jane Lewis, Amelia Winger-Bearskin and Shawne Holloway.
I'm going to do a short intro before each person and then we'll have time for questions at the end.
In the meantime as they're presenting if you have questions, you can put them into the chat and we'll work them into the discussion or when we're complete you can use the raise hand feature if you want to ask your question directly.
So we're going to start with Mindy Seu.
Mindy Seuy is a designer and is from Harvard graduate school of design and a [indistinct speech] at UCLA.
She began an archive of cyber feminism which she will talk about.
She has been coorganizing the arts of [indistinct speech] a couple years ago.
She recently joined the school of the arts faculty in 2019 and has taught at California college of the arts and [indistinct speech] school of art.
Go ahead Mindy.
Mindy Seu: Thank you for the introduction and invitation.
I'm going to screen share quickly.
Are you seeing a big green slide?
Cool.
So as Lauren mentioned in the intro I'm talking about the cyber feminism index.com.
Probably the easiest way to describe cyber feminism is to talk about the word itself.
This prefix cyber came into the notion of cybernetics and then used for cyber space in the 1980s.
There was a lot of Sci-Fi coming out around this time but it was dominated by the male gaze.
You have the cyber babes and fem bots.
When this bridged with cyber feminism in the early 90s it was trying to use this merging of this prefix and this root as a provocation.
So how can people from marginalized groups rethink what this cyber feminism means.
I tried to expand this into this idea of intersectional feminism as defined by Kimberley cren shah and bring together the idea of what cyber feminism might include even if they don't use that word exactly.
I found Latin American and Korean and afrofutureism and the index was trying to comment on the anticanon.
How can we make it as permeable and malleable as possible.
Ideally it would be open source, and crowd sourced.
I want to run through a few examples.
This is the cover image which includes a cyborg manifesto by donna [indistinct speech].
The cyber feminism manifesto.
Women's web ring, [indistinct speech] bindy girl.
[Indistinct speech] the world indigenous register and [indistinct speech] eddy's time traveler.
All of these things were coming out between the early 90s and 2020.
A quick over view of the website itself, it was inspired by two concepts.
The idea of how we might visualize citations and how we create a site that ages.
One of the influences was the 100 antithesis by the old boy's network.
This came out 2 decades ago.
To this day it's still working well because it's all static.
It only uses HTML and CSS .
They have not embed many technology into it.
So this website feels pretty durable.
As you move through the site it feels indexical and straightforward but the interaction of the website visitor makes it feel unusual.
You have the green glow and highlights.
The default fields change as you navigate the site.
I want to make sure the site responded to behavior and only when someone was interacting with it.
So as you click through the different entries, it tracks everything that you're opening and reveals descriptive text and metadata but it's also added to the side panel which we call the trail.
This is not stored within the data base itself .
It's purely for the visitor's use .
This allows a downloud which I'll talk about in a bit .
I also wanted to inject this idea of the cross reference.
So this is typically seen in printed pages.
Think about encyclopedias.
Within a current body it allows you to move around to different entries that might offer a critique or a support of the thing that you're reading.
So it tries to encourage this model of your reading experience.
For me it brought to mind the notion of gathering by [indistinct speech].
She's a writer based in Detroit .
Even when they do these [indistinct speech] projects she sees that as a form of gathering similar to the carry back theory by [indistinct speech] .
When you click the download in the trail panel you get a PDF .
All of these things are in creative comments .
As long as you give some sort of physical citation you don't have to ask for permission.
All of the things are exerts so tries to include as many different voices as possible.
Currently there are around 650.
Even with the launch last week I've already received 50 new entries .
The PDF view is really trying to encourage how you might reappropriate this context for your own needs and thinking about Paul [indistinct speech] idea of the download as an active protest .
I don't know if that was 5 minutes or 8 minutes but that is all I have for you.
Lauren McCarthy: That was wonderful.
I realized in my nervousness in the intro I forgot about the visual descriptions.
Will you give a visual description of yourself and you did a good job of walking us through the interface but I don't know if there's anything else visually you want to say.
Mindy: Yeah a visual description of my self I'm sitting in front of a window wearing a blackjackt.
I long black hair.
I'm a woman.
I'm Korean American.
The catalog or the interface itself actually embeds a lot of these accessibility notions built into the core .
So all the images have very clear alt text as well as when you navigate it encourages easy ways to -- verbally and text base communicate how you traverse the content.
Lauren McCarthy: Awesome .
Thank you, Mindy Seu.
So to catch you up, I am sitting in my home here.
I'm mix race Chinese American.
I have short dark hair and I'm a woman.
I'm wearing a striped shirt.
I'm really happy to introduce Ashley Jane Lewis who is an interactive artist.
Her practice reclaims the black culture of the past, present and future through analogue mediums.
Her work has been awarded most notably at the White House during Obama's presidency.
She has a BFA from [indistinct speech] university and was listed -- was a listed spot in the 2018 top black women to watch in Canada .
Ashley Jane Lewis: Apologies in advance my block has decided to do metal drilling at this moment.
So I'm trying to use this close range microphone so you don't hear that.
I'm going to share my screen.
Let's get into some slides.
Okay .
So as Lauren said, I'm really excited to be here.
I'm a speculative designer, a new media artist, educator and I like to make work inside the vein of aphrofutureism also referreds to an aphronowism.
I spend time thinking about the way social justice and the ethics of tech intersect with my practice.
At my heart of hearts the thing I most identify as a community organizer.
So this is a snippet of a couple art pieces from my practice that are related to this topic.
Then I'll share a few that are more from the hat of community organizer.
In my head it feels very interconnected.
This is a piece called aeroloom space ship.
This mimics or tries to mimic the idea behind reaching within to grasp strength and perseverance as a black woman navigating through the world.
The reason I show this piece today is especially through our opportunities present through COVID this piece was based on my lived experience and a series of interviews I held with 32 black women to talk about the additional emotional labors feel like in our experienced in our digital and real world.
This is part of a series of work that I'm developing through both culture hub and new Inc. residency.
The first project opened up an opportunity to do research on how we determine futures.
I'm glad that Mindy talked about science fiction because a lot of my work is based on that genre.
The research I have done to explore or stumble upon that 70% of technology is inspired by science fiction.
It makes me excited I guess at the real world effects of literature and art but worried in the reality that most of science fiction is written by white men and then creates the question who is writing the future .
I think that within the spectrum of what is the future there are a lot 06BIPOC 's are writing the future right now.
This series takes those nuggets of wisdom and embed them into real world technology.
In the beginning of the pandemic, a lot of my friends and I were as the world was spiraling and trying to figure out how to help, where to help -- it's funny to find yourself in a moment of crisis and try to find out where your practice belongs at this moment.
A friend of mine reminded me that years prior I work with a team to create a card game initially founded by Sarah Rothberg and [indistinct speech] that gives you world constraints around more livable futures.
My friends note was wouldn't that be something interesting to do today as a response to the enthusiasm around defunding the police.
So after the murder of George Floyd, we created the most rapid assembly of 20 people to work on running this open opportunity for largely black populations to explore the future and design the future without police.
The motivation behind that was to think -- if we are trying to defund the police, we need to determine what comes in its place and work together to think about how we would like a system of community that's supportive and based on care.
How would that look like or what would that look like?
We ran one session with our fingers crossed hoping we would get 20 participants .
Over night we had more than 250 applications from black creatives and allies all over the world trying to also grasp something that could help them imagine what a new future could look like.
So this online community assembled so quickly.
We ran 10 sessions over the summer and created 58 worlds that are on the process of being distributed online to tangibly say to our community that here's an idea of what our future could look like.
That was an exciting opportunity .
I know some people in this call were in attendance and helped.
Many thanks to you.
Here's a screen shot from one of our sessions imagining new futures that are noteal based in terms of community representing spectrums of jazz and how jazz is nodal and how we can use that as structures for community support.
I also spend a lot of time thinking about how we might gain wisdom for our internet presence for an equitable internet society from organizes including the gif on the slime mold on the left hand side.
It doesn't grow that fast.
This saproject that I work on with another aphrofutureestic artist [indistinct speech] especially exploring how we might consider new conversations around digital immigration and borders and how we identify as a society, as a global society from microorganisms like slime molds.
They have hundreds of sexualities, they have a nutritional distribution.
They have a non-hierarchal society .
So we run these workshops that helps us collaborate with slime mold and helps us learn about this creature.
So in terms of more data base projects, I have run a few iterations of this project that crowd source community data on black people who have died at the hand of police brutality and represent the data visionizations in the lungs that inflate and deflate.
In my hat as a community organizers through the learnings of that art practice I spend time thinking about codes of conduct, community agreements, how we create ethical systems online.
This is a talk that I gave a few weeks ago imagining the internet as a ball of yarn that needs to be detangled each time you join a new work space.
I've been working for the last few years with an incredible team on a project called ML5.
It's a sister project to P5 that allows for machine learning opportunities for beginning coders.
Through that experience we have had to make some really tough decisions about how we adequately articulate our responsibility as technologist.
This a screen cap from the beginning of the pandemic where we started a series of initiatives that made it clear we were in solidarity with black lives matter.
One of those elements is redefining a code of conduct for ML5 that we emulated for the ITP program at NYU.
I have a couple screen shots from that code of conduct.
It's a heavy load to think about how to take a technology space and an art space which historically have not been inclusive and make strict parameters that make an equitable future.
This has inspired 5 other technology schools to create their very first codes of conduct as well.
And I wanted to leave it there and I suppose maybe even articulate how meaningful my art practice has been, my technological practice imagine new futures.
The most powerful combination of people has been a mixture of artist and technologist.
I think it takes imagination to think about how technology might function differently now that we've been using it for the better part of our lives to create our society infrastructure.
So the structure of imagining wild futures helps to unpin ourselves from what has traditionally been our method of technological engagement .
Lauren McCarthy: Thank you, Ashley .
That was wonderful.
I thought that last image was beautiful.
Can you give us a quick visual description of that?
Ashley: Sure.
Let me go back to it .
This is a picture of me standing with my back to the camera.
I'm standing in front of a pile of found objects arranged to look like a space ship.
As much as a child may design a space ship from found objects.
This is an imagine, structure that is overlayed by a projection of space.
All of which the projection and sound that omits from this project is governed by touch censors embedded on the structure like a cheese grader and metal bowls.
I'm a black woman mix race.
I'm wearing a blue sweater .
Some eardescence earrings.
I'm standing in front of a blank wall.
Yeah, I think that's everything .
Lauren McCarthy: Thank you, Ashley .
Cool.
So we're going to go to Amelia Winger-Bearskin who is the founder of wampum .codes.
In 2019 she was a presenter to [indistinct speech] world head quarters in [indistinct speech] for fostering human ethics and compassion.
She was [indistinct speech] for her collaboration with Wendy [indistinct speech] who is supported by the [indistinct speech] program.
She is exhibited at the New York [indistinct speech] she is the founder of stupid hack thon .com.
She is [indistinct speech] [speaking foreign language] of the [indistinct speech] nation.
Amelia: Thank you so much for having me.
It's a pleasure to be with these incredible panelist.
Can everyone see my video ?
I'm going to quickly stop sharing.
I'm going to post this in the chat is a description of my presentation so you can have it available for closed captioning .
If history was written by the victors then the history will be written by the vectors.
AI will change our world.
If it is said that those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it are [indistinct speech].
When Thomas Jefferson and [indistinct speech] for the United States government they were [indistinct speech] we call our [indistinct speech] people of the long house were made up of the [indistinct speech] Thomas Jefferson spent over a year with us in one of our largest cities .
When the other founding fathers drafted the constitution they chery picked the best parts.
The bits that inlined with their idealology, representation, checks and balances, etc.
They left out the social and cultural networks that sustain these practices.
In the [indistinct speech] constitution women, clan mothers are the only ones who can vote for the representative who is always a man.
The word clan mother and chief is the same word.
There's a balance of power that only men would serve and women could vote.
Everyone in the community participated in planting and harvesting.
It was not an economy of slavery dependent agculture.
.
We're unconcerned with the effect it will have on the people I take from.
This is like trying to run a program without checking dependency.
What is it is dependent on balance of power or gender lines or one different from those European settlers.
Or if the environment is projected and maintain sustainable practices.
We all have colonial mind set because our culture has colonial mind set We don't have to live under a colonial empire any more.
We talk about models over fitting which is a model of low degree of bias.
It doesn't have predictive power .
Under fitting is high bias and low variance .
This is when you make a generalization without enough data.
The big problem with colonial mind set is one of under fitting.
Extracting idea without the context that made that idea work in the first place.
I'm here to say don't colonize our future.
Our data needs to come from diverse societies .
For instance, let's say you want to lay the ground work run by the blockchain.
What does that look like ?
What are the consequences.
If we don't have significant data we will have to wing it.
But we have years of decentralized society.
[Indistinct speech] helped us govern our society for centuries.
Wampum is an example of anticedent technology.
There are many more cases like this .
The Inca had time keeping technology .
When we want to use AI or blockchain and want positive change in the world we don't need to throw out thousands of years of data .
I want people to know that indigenous people had technologies that solved complex issues.
I want them to use our data to [indistinct speech] and just because we have 500 years of slavery worker exploitation, we have had thousands of years of peace and prosperity right here in the country where I'm standing right now.
Thank you.
I'm in my home in my office.
There are plants behind me.
I'm a woman.
I have short hair.
I'm [indistinct speech] bear clan on my mother's side.
My father is Jewish.
I'm wearing a red shirt .
Thank you.
Lauren McCarthy: Thank you.
Lastly we have Shawne Holloway who is a new media artist and poet known for using sound video and performance .
Currently Shawne teaches at the school of the art institute of Chicago.
Go for it Shawne.
Shawne: Thank you so much.
I am not going to have any screen share.
So I will just describe what you see on the screen.
I'm a light skinned black woman .
Wearing a very long very dark black straight shared wig situation.
I've got glasses on and shirt with swirls that is playing with some of the web cam algorithm.
I'm in my room and there's a big furry blanket to my left.
I do teach a lot and have this practice.
It goes through many different iterations.
One of the things I'm always thinking about is man it don't got to be like this.
None of this stuff has to be like this.
None of it.
We decided it in some way and some of us didn't get a say but now there's more opportunities for us to get a say.
So I'm sitting in the mid of this and say what do we do?
Part of this is also coming from an older internet artist generation of we used to hang out with our friends in second life and I'm feeling a resistance of where do all the weird counter culture artist go?
I don't want to be with everybody else and now everybody's on the computer .
So that increases the things of what do we do?
I was invited to a symposium called freedom of speech a curriculum for studies on darkness that was actually using MR [indistinct speech] film such a morning as a part of departure Lauren [indistinct speech] and [indistinct speech] invited me to talk through this about how internet can produce freedom and I said it can't.
They said maybe we should elaborate on this.
I wrote a text called of the web is a home front and freedoms of speech in general.
Something I hear among the young ones I'm in class with.
They remind me all the time I'm trying to get free.
I'm like me too I think.
So they're energy is so good.
They are asking me all the time what do we do and I'm feeling like what do we do what do we do.
So these are a few notes from that text that I had written.
There's a lot of information that's missing.
So it will come in the text but hopefully we can piece things together.
Thinking through the history of technology as a fluid mode of transportation for rich and abstract content, we see everything from the lightbulb to Morse code to fintech applications as creating agility for the communication of different types of complex signifiers that either replace written language or provide a subtext for that language with gestural relationships and expressions (which we will also give the name Language). The Web’s dynamic system of paths and destinations engenders and distributes abstractions of these Languages and Language-systems. These not only perform the efficient computation and storage of information, but also more domestic but complicated exchanges of that information including but not limited to spoken Language through the transmission of audio visual representation of nuanced human functions (or feelings) through video chat services and more. Not only are these examples of the limitlessness of what networks should be charged with communicating exactly what makes the Internet, and by extension the Web, so dynamic, but such limitlessness is also what makes it such a beautifully mysterious, risky, and desirable place to inhabit.
When [the Web as we know it] became the Internet standard, the white, linear, page-focused, copycat structure of the book became locked into our imagination and has since dictated what kinds of content can and should be created for the entirety of the digital space. The familiarity-cum-legibility of the structure of the book form, loaded with white Western ideologies of how knowledge is produced and circulated, tricks us into thinking that we are held to exactly the same standards as those made for words on a page, and that the Internet is somehow the answer to analog printing technology’s seemingly unsolvable shortcomings. This is understandable when we consider the purpose of the earliest Internet services such as transmitting academic research and cataloguing information from libraries across long distances.
To think alongside American Artist, this highly structural effacement of Language is part and parcel of the colonial roots of web development and central to the Wild West metaphors that continue to influence how we approach digital technologies. In their essay “Black Gooey Universe” they remind us that Whiteness, as it often follows in the wake of the ruin (or literal death) of darkness and Blackness, both requires and multiplies “market driven products that are anti-black, an echo chamber of white ideals (i.e. an ivory tower), and the creation of public-facing devices and platforms where white space is posited as neutral.” From its developers, the Web has inherited this faux neutrality as a method of making itself more legible for early adopters. While neutrality might sound like a desirable element of freedom, there can be no freedom without equity, as equity cannot exist alongside neutrality. In contrast, equity defines and prioritizes fairness in the allocation of a given resource. American Artist’s presentation of a racialized color theory is one way to measure the effects of the GUI.
Because it’s hard to imagine a world where we could replace the Web with an entirely new system that had suddenly fixed all its failings, it might be useful to find a method of refactoring it, making the inner workings of the Web, a complex behemoth, at least more suited toward a malleable future and the liberation of the individual user.
However, in order to refactor the Web, a collective decision must be made about what it should and should not be used for moving forward. It is likely that privileges and conveniences to which users have become accustomed will be difficult to discard, even in the name of space that supports truer freedom(s).
Initiatives towards a Web that centers freedom have long been in motion thanks to writers, scholars, developers, and artists. Some find and study the errors and disadvantages of their era’s dominant virtual networks, visionaries such as Ted Nelson with his Xanadu project. There are others who have triggered or experimented with the Web’s shortcomings and inconsistencies, including artists from the collective Electronic Disturbance Theater, who used creative coding to create platforms for server jamming virtual protests, and the larger Glitch movement, that made space for the beauty and richness of failures.
There are also those who are given opportunities to build on top of our networked landscape, like indie game developers, journalists, or social media users. They collectively work together to mold digital culture through Language—poetics, multilingual text content, coding languages, etc—into a comfortable tool that centers support for the free and open distribution of whatever, including but not limited to basic individual freedoms like the freedom of speech, freedom of choice, movement, and innovation.
However, when something is broken although we’ve tried our hardest to fix it, we are forced to begin to consider getting a new one. In the same way, Ted Nelson recognized in his early research that the medium of the book wasn’t suitable for the screen, we should begin to recognize what characteristics of the Web aren’t a good look for the Internet—or for us.
It can be any way that we need it to be .
Lauren McCarthy: Thank you .
That was our last presentation and I want to open it up now to have conversation between the panelist and participants.
Before I do that I was suggested in the back channel that I give a little context for this P5JS thing that I mentioned which is actually the way we sort of all know each other and through extended networks.
I think it relates to something you were talking about, Shawnev which is how do we build different things .
P5JS description is an open source library for making creative work on the web and learning to code .
I think what's been important to us about it is these values of inclusion and diversity and access are essential to the project.
You have heard a few speakers talk about rather than retrofit accessibility or thinking about inclusion to product efforts these are the grounding principles which we try to build which we have made mistakes and reworked and reimagined but that's sort of the guiding vision for that project.
So that's one of the kernels that brought us together.
