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CNMAP Symposium 2019

CNMAP Symposium 2019: Critiquing the Platform. Power, Principles, and Transformative posibilities

Friday 3rd May 2019, 9 AM - 5:30 PM
Black Box Theatre, L.R. Wilson Hall
Michelle Murphy Keynote

KEYNOTE_ MICHELLE MURPHY: OIL, DATA, AND DECOLONIAL LAND/BODY RELATIONS

Not only is pollution a form of colonialism, so too is Canada’s permission-to-pollute regulatory system also a form of colonialism. As part of this system, corporate and state data about pollution primarily erases rather than reveals environmental violence. This talk discusses the practices of an Indigenous-led, collaborative project called The Land and the Refinery that attempts to bring Canada’s oldest oil refinery and state-collected environmental data into responsibility for past and future Land/body relations.

Michelle Murphy is a science and technology studies scholar who works on feminist, decolonial and indigenous science studies with a focus on environment, data, and reproductive justice. She is director of the Technoscience Research Unit at the University of Toronto, a home for social justice and science and technology studies work, as well as the Environmental Data Justice Lab, an Indigenous-led collaborative research lab. She is a founding member of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, co-organizer of the Technoscience Salon and a lead editor of the journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. She is the author of three books, most recently The Economization of Life (Duke UP 2017), which won the Fleck Prize from the Society for the Social Studies of Science. She is a Professor of Women and Gender Studies and History at the University of Toronto.
Panel I

PANEL I_ PLATFORMS AND POWER [Coordinated by Sara Bannerman with contributions from Christina Baade, Rena Bivens, Merlyna Lim, Leslie Regan Shade, Tamara Shepherd, and Andrea Zeffiro]

Platforms and algorithms play increasingly important roles in many aspects of our lives, including the discovery of cultural works. This has significant implications for life opportunities and employment (whose content is distributed and prioritized?), the star system (who is promoted and how?), politics (which and whose perspective is dominant?), international relations (whose view of the world is dominant?) and social relations (how are inequities in representation reproduced or addressed?). For these reasons, platform accountability is now in the forefront of public concern.
How should platforms and algorithms be held to account? What research approaches and methods can be used to do this? This panel will draw together researchers in Canada to explore and discuss the research approaches and methods they use for studying platforms and holding platforms to account. The goal of this panel is to highlight, study and share the methods by which researchers can examine, gain insight into, challenge, and transform the power of algorithms and platforms.
The panel will take a roundtable format, with panelists responding to questions such as: Discuss a research design that can disrupt the current structures of platform power. What type of research on platforms and algorithms would you like to see more of? What barriers do researchers face in conducting research on platforms and algorithms?
Panel II

PANEL II_ PLATFORMS FOR PRINCIPLED ENGAGEMENT: PROBLEMATIC COLLABORATION REPERTOIRES [Coordinated by Paula Gardner with contributions from Awo Abokor, Peter Cockett, Phil Cote, T.L. Cowan, Amber Dean, and Jasmine Rault]

University researchers engaging in partnerships and collaborations often work from a position centering personal research interests, discrete worldviews, western epistemologies of knowledge creation, constrained methods of data capture and analysis, and top down organizational practices. Claire Bishop challenges us to rethink participation as necessarily “good” contending instead that participation should explore antagonisms in social relations, and foment discomfort. Kim TallBear offers a feminist indigenous alternative, where researchers work from the “standpoint” of women, traditional cultures, and other marginalized subjects to counter the lauding of objectivity. Gayatri Spivak cautions us that the choice to choose an ‘ethical’ approach often betrays a position of privilege; this prohibition is reflected in how Michelle Murphy reads care and responsibility as non-innocent practices in research and feminism that circulate orientations within larger “non-innocent formations”— capitalist and colonialist logics and repertoires. Panel members explore the histories and dynamics that give rise to uneven university-community collaborations, and discuss their experiences seeking to undo dynamics propped up by systems, platforms, habits and repertoires.


ABSTRACTS

_Awo Abokor:Feminist and Anti-O practices for public and on-line spaces
Abokor will discuss the embodied collaboration tools and techniques utilized throughout the EFECT project (Experiments in Feminist Ethical Collaborative Tools & Techniques), which is a collaboration of academic and NGO activists creating digital literacy tools for marginalized youth. The presentation will draw particular attention to how to engage anti-oppressive feminist, and digital literacies practices, via collaboration and as interventions in public and online space(s).
_Peter Cockett: Power politics of collaborative creation
Devised theatre is often lauded for the increased democracy in its processes. I will talk about how these affordances cannot be taken for granted and are often contested moment by moment as work is created. The presentation includes a discussion of Cockett’s Agile Film Training approach, which aims to bring lessons learned from devising theatre with the diverse student body at McMaster, into the often hierarchical, and silo-bound process of film-making.
_Phil Cote
Cote will discuss his art practice/research, which seeks to unearth, and reveal his cultural experience and knowledge of signs of Indigenous symbols, language and interpretation. Openings are thus created both within the archive/academia and broader public that enable these embedded stereotypes to transform under the gaze of an Indigenous based interpreted presence and intervene in the cross generational colonial bias. Cote will discuss his more recent work: Mural Routes and Mocassin Identifier.
_Amber Dean: Colonialism, Neoliberalism, and University-Community Engagement
I will speak about my newly-released co-edited collection (with Susanne Luhmann and Jennifer L. Johnson), Feminist Praxis Revisited: Critical Reflections on University-Community Engagement. The book turns to the field of Women’s and Gender Studies to explore tensions arising between the field’s commitments to social justice learning and the wider mainstreaming of community engaged-learning at universities across Canada. I’ll raise questions about the kinds of encounters with/across difference encouraged through mainstream approaches to community engagement and consider whether/how feminist praxis encourages approaches more attentive to power, identity/difference, and principled engagement.
_Jasmine Rault & T.L. Cowan: Pushing back against compulsory
We will speak about our two digital projects--the Digital Research Ethics Collaboratory (DREC) and the Cabaret Commons--and the ways that we study digitization and other forms of remediation as threshold processes that allow us to think critically about scale, temporality, access, transparency, privacy, collaboration, accountability, reciprocality, resources, power, and research ethics. In particular, we will discuss what we have come to call the “compulsory dispossessive normativity” of settler academic logics and cultures.
Panel III

PANEL III_ POLITICAL DIMENSIONS OF CODE ART AND SOFTWARE PRODUCTION [Coordinated by David Ogborn with contributions from Ramsey Nasser, Luis N. del Angel, Allison Parrish, Ari Schlesinger, and Alejandro Tamayo]

Platforms are political not only in their deployment (ie. the uses to which they are put) but also in their production, which is mediated by the exigencies of “code” (ie. the ensemble of notations, practices, and cultural formations that set a computational event in motion). Such exigencies can be revealed, and sometimes changed, when codework intersects with the increasingly entwined resistant imaginaries of art and open-source software. This panel examines diverse, contemporary ways in which ethical and political questions arise at this juncture, and takes the form of five short individual presentations followed by general discussion.


ABSTRACTS

_Luis N. del Angel: Live coding as a development project?
Thinking code as a “type of language” and furthermore, as “one” type of language, enables the possibility of diversity but obscures the possibility of equality. A perceivable homogenized conception of code as a capsule of self-evident modes of communication persists, from Silicon Valley corporations to critical code researchers and from international development agencies to media artists. I propose to explore these modes of communication in connection with two creative-coding projects bringing together UNESCO, The Raspberry Pi Foundation, and the international live coding scene. This presentation aims to expose software production for the arts as a contradictory participant in the ongoing discourse of development.
_Ramsey Nasser: Text systems that actually deal with text: How to avoid baking anglocentric biases into your computing systems and art
Since their earliest days computers have claimed to support the processing of “text”. A reasonable assumption for the definition of “text” in this case might be “human writing” but in reality “text” on computers has tended to mean “ASCII encoded Latin characters”. This persists to the present day, with the result being that software applications and protocols almost as a rule will butcher non-Latin scripts despite claiming to support “text”. What are the ethical dimensions of a computing experience that requires its users to abandon their own written culture and adopt a foreign one? How can tool makers empower their users to use their own languages? How can digital artists avoid the trap of making work that alienates or insults the cultures of their audience? How can code art educators equip their students with the perspectives to build more ethical experiences and systems?
_Allison Parrish: Poetry and predictive language models
Barthes states that the poet “does not allow the obligation of their language to speak for them... and has a utopian vision of a total language in which nothing is compulsory.” Neural network language models propose the opposite: a vision of language where the next word in any stretch of language can be perfectly predicted based on knowledge of the words that came before. Recent research in computational creativity emphasizes the role of language models in tasks like poetry generation. In this talk, I present contemporary work in the field of computer-generated poetry (including some of my own) and consider whether language models can truly help in the composition of poetry that (as Wallace Stevens writes) “resist the intelligence / almost successfully.”
_Ari Schlesinger: FATAL ERROR!: Overreacting to Discrimination in Open Source Software
A fatal error occurred. 01101111 01110100 01101000 01100101 01110010 (Access Violation). You may need to force quit this community. Would you like to try again? Warning, outcome likely the same... Exclusion in an open culture may seem paradoxical. But, here we are—situated in a culture that takes any reaction to harassment and discrimination as an overreaction. In this talk, I will overreact to discrimination in open source software. Together, we’ll explore some of the ethical implications of participating in alternative software production.
_Alejandro Tamayo: The built environment as an open-source repository, not of code but of affects
The built environment is guided by the logic of capitalism, which implies the process of monetary exchange. But under this logic the diagonally opposed logic of the gift also permeates. An ephemeral language of forms, materials and actions is available to anyone who disposes himself/herself to be moved by the micro-affects of the territory.




BIOGRAPHIES

_Awo Abokor is a community-based educator and facilitator. She lives and works in Toronto, within the territory of the One Dish, One Spoon Wampum, a treaty between the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe Peoples. Toronto is also on the traditional territory of the Huron-Wendat, Seneca, and Petun Peoples, and most recently, territory stewarded by the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. She has over 10 years of experience as an anti-sexual violence, anti-racist educator and facilitator. Over the past 10 years, she has created, developed and co-designed curriculum and programs in collaboration with non-profit organizations, post-secondary and public service institutions across Canada. Her work is grounded in working with and from a decolonial, intersectional feminist and transformative justice framework with the goal of making our systems/spaces safer and more just for all.
_Sara Bannerman. Canada Research Chair in Communication Policy and Governance, is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at McMaster University in Canada. She researches and teaches on communication policy and governance, and directs McMaster’s Communications Governance Observatory. She has published two books on international copyright: International Copyright and Access to Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and The Struggle for Canadian Copyright: Imperialism to Internationalism, 1842-1971 (UBC Press, 2013), as well as numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on international copyright, privacy, and other topics in new media, traditional media, and communications theory. Bannerman is a Vice Chair of the Law Section of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR).
_Christina Baade is a Full Professor in the Department of Communication Studies and Multimedia at McMaster University, where she also holds the title of University Scholar (2015–19). She is affiliated with the program in Gender Studies and Feminist Research, the Cultural Studies and Critical Theory MA Program, and the Centre for Networked Media and Performance. Dr. Baade researches popular music, media, and performance. Her research examines how broadcasting (especially radio) has intersected with musical performances and cultural meaning, with particular attention to the role played by gender, race, class, nationality, and sexuality. This work spans from jazz and popular music broadcasting at the British Broadcasting Corporation in the 1930s and 1940s to midcentury television in Britain to the contemporary use of music streaming services in domestic spaces. Dr. Baade’s current research focuses on the work of women musicians in popular music, specifically Beyoncé and the iconic British singer Dame Vera Lynn.
_Rena Bivens is Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Her research interests include software design, normativity, gender, race, and violence. She is the author of Digital Currents: How Technology and the Public are Shaping TV News (University of Toronto Press 2014) and her work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as New Media & Society, Feminist Media Studies, Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media & Technology, the Canadian Journal of Communication, Information, Communication & Society, Social Media + Society, and the International Journal of Communication.
_Peter Cockett is Associate Professor in the Theatre and Film Studies programme at McMaster University’s School of Arts where he teaches acting, devising, and collective creation, and directs the department’s main stage production. Cockett is currently focused on two research projects relevant to this panel. The first, Agile Films Training, integrates devised theatre creation with film-making in the community and aims to foster a more accessible and inclusive film development process. The second is a performance-as-research project in theatre history, Engendering the Stage in the Age of Shakespeare and Beyond. Working in collaboration with Melinda Gough (McMaster), Lucy Munro (King’s College London) and Clare McManus (Roehampton University), the project explores the performance of gender on the early modern stages of Europe. Last September, he ran a performance as research project at the Stratford Lab that explored scenes featuring sword-wielding women that contain traces of trans-identities, working with actors from the destival, a team of international scholars, and trans and two-spirit guest artist. He has published on early modern performance practices and the use of performance as a tool for scholarship and research. At McMaster he has directed and devised 13 mainstage productions, including cas9 (2016), a collaboration with deaf actor Cat McKinnon, and Marilo Nuñez’ new play Demos Kratos (2018). Peter is also a professional actor. Credits include: American Gods (Starz), Private Eyes (Global), Saving Hope (CTV), The Memory of Water (Taragon Theatre/Elgin Winter Garden), and Murdoch Mysteries (Shaftesbury Films).
_Phil Cote is a Sundancer, Pipe Carrier and Sweat Ceremony leader recognized by Elder Vern Harper and Floyd Looks for Buffalo Hand. Cote received his Indigenous name Noodjmowin (The Healer) in 1979 from Joe Couture and was made a member of the Falseface Society at the Seneca longhouse in 1992. A graduate of OCAD University’s Interdisciplinary Art Media and Design Masters program in 2015, Cote has been exploring new ways to imbue sculpture and painting through oral traditions of storytelling and with traditional spiritual perspectives. Cote’s intent is to bring accuracy to the colonial archives through new research via archival and lived cultural practice and deep understanding of cultural symbolism. Cote has created public murals including the 1000 square foot mural Kiinwin Dabaadjmowin (Our Story) Mural for the Mississauga’s of New Credit First Nation. As part of the Planet Indigenous Festival, 2004, he was artist in residence at the McMichael Art Gallery sculpting with soapstone. In 2005, Cote created a large-scale mural at Fort York entitled Niinwin Dabaadjmowin – (We Are Talking) a 20-panel, 80-foot mural depicting the rich history of the Anishinaabe people with First Nations street level youth and community members. Cote shares his knowledge on the teachings of the Seven Grandfathers, the Medicine Wheel, Pipe, Naming and Sacred Fire Ceremonies, and the History of the Land through teaching and cultural interpretation at York University, the Art Gallery of Ontario, University of Toronto, Ryerson University, OCAD University, and the Toronto District School Board through the Aboriginal Education Centre.
_Amber Dean is Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies, cross-appointed to the Graduate Program in Gender Studies and Feminist Research at McMaster University. Her research focuses on public mourning, violence, and cultural memory, and investigates the question of what makes a life widely grievable in the context of contemporary, colonial Canada. She is also interested in how creative forms of cultural production (fiction, art, photography, film, performance) disrupt and reframe common-sense understandings of whose lives (and deaths) matter. She is the author of Remembering Vancouver’s Disappeared Women: Settler Colonialism and the Difficult Work of Inheritance (University of Toronto Press, 2015), and co-editor of two recent books, Remembering Air India: The Art of Public Mourning with Chandrima Chakraborty and Angela Failler (University of Alberta Press, 2018) and Feminist Praxis Revisited: Critical Reflections on University-Community Engagement with Susanne Luhmann and Jennifer L. Johnson (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2019).
_Luis N. del Angel. Currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Communication, New Media, and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Canada. His research intersects with live coding, metacreation, and software studies. From 2010 to 2013 he worked at the National Center for the Arts (Mexico) exploring live coding and Free/Libre and Open Source Software. He is a member of the live coding collective RGGTRN (Mexico) and the laptop ensemble the Cybernetic Orchestra (Canada).
_Paula Gardner [Ph.D.] is Asper Chair in Communications in the Faculty of Communication Studies and Multimedia, at McMaster University. Gardner directs Pulse Lab, which engages in critical participatory, action and anti-oppression based research with community based groups, employing critical praxis and digital technologies to address community-defined needs. Gardner’s multimedia practice and scholarship binds feminism, media studies, human computer interaction, and science and technology studies. She is currently PI on the EFECT project--(Experiments in Feminist Ethical Collaborative Tools & Techniques) which is crafting feminist anti-O approaches to digital literacy and the ABLE Project, creating an app for seniors with fragility and dementia that creates rehabilitation therapy as art and game experiences. Gardner is currently completing a manuscript entitled Pace, the Affective Labour of Activity Trackers and a documentary film entitled No Asylum.
_Merlyna Lim is Canada Research Chair in Digital Media and Global Network Society with the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University, and ALiGN Media Lab Director/Founder. Professor Merlyna Lim’s research interests revolve around societal implications of technology, particularly digital media and information technology. Conceptually, she is particularly interested in teasing out the complex relationship between space, time, and power. Throughout her research career, Lim has looked at digital media in a wide range of contexts, including its influence on democracy, identity and religion, and civic spaces. An award winning scholar, including an awardee of the Best Publication Award 2012 in Information Systems, Professor Lim was also named “One of 100 Most Inspiring Indonesian Women” by the Kartini Foundation in 2011. Previously she was a Visiting Research Professor with Princeton University’s Center of Information Technology Policy and a Distinguished Scholar of Technology and Public Engagement at Arizona State University. In 2016, she is named a member of the Royal Society of Canada‘s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists.
_Ramsey Nasser is a Brooklyn-based Lebanese computer scientist and artist researching computing as a medium of self expression. His interests include programming languages, game design, typography, education and the implicit cultural biases that creep into them all. When he is not at his desk you might catch him on a long motorcycle trip.
_David Ogborn: artist-programmer, composer, live coding and guitar performer; lead developer of numerous software projects used in network music and live coding, including EspGrid, extramuros, and Estuary; founder of the Cybernetic Orchestra and the Networked Imagination Laboratory, and director of the Centre for Networked Media and Performance (CNMAP) at McMaster University; Associate professor in McMaster’s Department of Communication Studies and Multimedia, teaching in the undergraduate Multimedia program, the MA in Communication and New Media, and the PhD in Communication, New Media, and Cultural Studies. http://www.dktr0.net
_Allison Parish is a computer programmer, poet, educator and game designer whose teaching and practice address the unusual phenomena that blossom when language and computers meet, with a focus on artificial intelligence and computational creativity. She is an Assistant Arts Professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, where she earned her master’s degree in 2008.
_Jasmine Rault and TL Cowan: Jasmine Rault is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information & Technology and Department of Sociology at University Toronto Mississauga. T.L. Cowan is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies (Digital Media Cultures) in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media (UTSC) and the Faculty of Information (iSchool) at the University of Toronto. Together, Rault and Cowan write about research economies, Trans- Feminist & Queer (TFQ) research cultures and digital archives. They are co-directors of the Digital Ethics Research Collaboratory (DREC; drecollab.org), and the Cabaret Commons: An Online Exhibition and Publication Space for Trans- Feminist & Queer Artists, Activists, Audiences and Researchers (cabaretcommons.org). Cowan and Rault are currently co-authoring a book, provisionally entitled Checking In: Experiments in Trans- Feminist & Queer Networked Intimate Publics. Their recent collaborative publications include, “Onlining Queer Acts: Digital Research Ethics and Caring for Risky Archives.” (Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 2018); “Haven’t you ever heard of Tumblr? FemTechNet’s Distributed Open Collaborative Course” (DOCC), “Pedagogical Publics, and Classroom Incivility” (in MOOCs and Their Afterlives: Experiments in Scale and Access in Higher Education, ed. Elizabeth Losh, 2017); “The Labour of Being Studied in a Free Love Economy” (in ephemera: theory and politics in organization, 2014) and “Speculative Praxis Toward a Queer Feminist Digital Archive” (co-authored with Dayna McLeod, in Ada: Gender, New Media, and Technology, 2014). T.L. Cowan is also a collaborator on the Experiments in Feminist Ethical Collaboration Tools/Technologies (EFECT) project.
_Leslie Regan Shade is a professor in the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. Shade’s research focuses on the social and policy aspects of information and communication technologies (ICTs), particularly related to gender, youth, political economy, and the public interest. She is a co-investigator on three SSHRC projects: the eQuality Project, a partnership designed to create new knowledge about the ways in which diverse groups of young people conceptualize privacy and the potential for equality in networked spaces; Opening the Door on Digital Privacy: Practices, Policies, & Pedagogies, examining the relationship between young adults and digital privacy; and City as Platform: Smart Cities and Civic Engagement in the Data Society, an investigation of the relationship of civic engagement and the development of networked smart technology across global cities.
_Tamara Shepherd is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, Media and Film at the University of Calgary. Previously, she held Fellowships at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Ted Rogers School of Information Technology Management at Ryerson University. She received her PhD in the Joint Doctorate in Communication at Concordia University, Montréal. She studies the feminist political economy of digital culture, looking at policy, labour and literacy in social media, mobile technologies, and digital games. She is an editorial board member of Social Media + Society, and her work has been published in Convergence, First Monday, International Journal of Cultural Studies, and the Canadian Journal of Communication.
_Ari Schlesinger researches how we can build equity into software, hardware, and the design process. Her work in Human-Computer Interaction uncovers strategies for addressing complicated tech problems by connecting people, systems, and infrastructure in novel ways. Previously, Ari worked with the Human Experience & Design Group at Microsoft and as a Research Project Manager on an NSF grant. Schlesinger is a PhD student in the Human-Centered Computing program in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. To find out more, check out www.AriSchlesinger.com
_Alejandro Tamayo. is a visual artist, researcher and educator based in Hamilton. His practice encompasses site-specific projects and interdisciplinary collaborations. Tamayo graduated from the practice-based PhD in Visual Arts (in sculpture and installation) from York University and holds an MFA (in digital media) from the National University of Colombia. He currently teaches in the Graduate Program in Digital Futures at OCAD University. His work has been included in exhibitions in Canada, Colombia, Spain, the United States, Mexico, Argentina, Finland, and Czech Republic. Website: http://www.thepopshop.org/
_Andrea Zeffiro is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies and Multimedia at McMaster University. She is also the Academic Director of the Lewis & Ruth Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship at McMaster University. With a decade of experience working within interdisciplinary digital research networks in Canada, Andrea is invested in thinking methodologically about, with and through digital technologies.