How can we redesign the underlying algorithms of technological systems to address the social and ecological inequalities they propel and sustain?

The inequalities within human society and between humans and other beings in our shared ecosystem remain unresolved yet pressing issues of our past and present. The existing technological systems we (re-)create, be it machines, hardware, or money, discriminate against people of colour, support warfare and recognise non-humans only by the monetary value attached to them. It is difficult to speak of freedom when our Western culture has for centuries been relying on the oppression of the marginalised for the benefit of the privileged.

In the year program Technologies Otherwise, Baltan Laboratories attempts to disentangle the complex web of assumptions that inform our technological systems. For this STRP Scenario, Baltan introduces artists and researchers who propose alternatives to the dominant narratives in, for instance, machine learning and financial technologies, which have been saturated with racial and specific hierarchies. The artists intend to take us a step further, redesigning or hacking the structure and processes of our technological systems to enact alternative stories and make them experiential. The existing and ongoing projects of our speakers present how, for example, our financial system could be restructured to account for the environmental destruction caused by human activity or how we can hack the energy system to diverge from providing financial profits to warfare. The session will be moderated by Lorenzo Gerbi, co-director at Baltan Laboratories.

Programme
13:00-13:10 Introduction by Lorenzo Gerbi
13:10-13:40 Keynote lecture: Ramon Amaro
13:40-13:50 Q&A
13:50-14:05 Artist presentation: Ianis Dobrev
14:05-14:20 Artist presentation: Egór Kraft
14:20-14:30 Break
14:30-15:00 Discussion with speakers (fishbowl technique)

Speakers

​​Ramon Amaro
Dr. Ramon Amaro is Senior Researcher for Digital Culture and Lead Curator of -1, a digital culture research laboratory at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. His writings, research and artistic practice emerge at the intersections of Black Study, digital culture, psychosocial study, and the critique of computational reason. His recent book, "The Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being" (Sternberg, 2023) contemplates the abstruse nature of programming and mathematics, and the deep incursion of racial hierarchy, to inspire alternative approaches to contemporary algorithmic practice.

Ianis Dobrev
Ianis Dobrev is the founder of the Chimerical Intelligence Lab, an aesthetic think tank for an Ecomorphic Finance. The Lab manifests itself in a multimodal series of thought experiments on the possibility of repairing the epistemological and ontological rupture between finance and ecology. It proposes an aesthetic framework to canalise multidisciplinary discourses and catalyse the research into new knowledge objects that support alternative (aesthetic) perspectives.

Egór Kraft
Egór Kraft is an in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary artist work­ing at the in­ter­sec­tion of arts, me­dia, tech­nol­ogy, film and re­search. He is a lecturer at European universities, author of publications and a co-founder of the collective computation research studio wwww.work. In his work, Egór is concerned with the ontologies of human and non-human agencies and the epistemic of technologies often expressed in the form of speculative models & thought–object experiments. Via speculative narratives, Egór tends to highlight frictions between human reasoning and quantitative orders rendered by machines, industrialisation & anthropogenic interventions at large.

Lorenzo Gerbi (moderator)
Lorenzo Gerbi is a designer, curator and educator based in Eindhoven (NL). He is the co-director of Baltan Laboratories, a cultural indisciplinary lab focusing on societal issues through a relational approach, creating spaces to rehearse living otherwise. He is a co-author of the publication HumaniTies and Artificial Intelligence (European Commission, 2022) and Editor-in-Chief of Fictional Journal. He recently contributed to the book AS IF - 16 Dialogues about Sheep, Black Holes, and Movement (Spector Books, 2023) with an essay entitled On Separations.

The event is co-organised with Baltan Laboratories and kindly supported by Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie as a part of Baltan’s year programme Technologies Otherwise and part of ARTeCHÓ, an initiative of five European institutions to create a peer-to-peer learning community for artists to learn more about the technical side of the art-making process and its intersection with new technologies, Crypto Art, blockchain, and NFT marketplaces. ARTeCHÓ is a Creative Europe project funded by the European Commission.