Walking the Rope: A Reading Circle on Bios, Norms, and Utopias mit Zas Ieluhee und Sara Morais dos Santos Bruss

In the organizer's words:

Walking the Rope: A Reading Circle on Bios, Norms, and Utopias
With Zas Ieluhee and Sara Morais dos Santos Bruss

Activation and artist talk

EN

AI and digital twins, often presented as real-time avatars, extend a long history of infrastructures that automate and reproduce stereotypes. At the same time, these systems have the potential to reveal stereotypes for what they really are: narratives that keep people in line and communities in place. Stereotypical representations, as they have been manifesting through text-to-image generators in recent years, reduce complex interior worlds to schemata and cultural hegemony, thus automating and reproducing historical inequalities. In this activation of Zas Ieluhee's installation Wùn Ná Kre, the audience is invited to participate in a reading circle engaging with questions of science and technology, and how a tradition of science critique is actualized with and through AI. Together with the artist, this session takes shape through a communal digestion of text, processing how AI is transforming our relations to what has been registered as the canon of traditional science. Turning the tables on these big texts by 'big men', Zas Ieluhee invites participants to ponder on and rest with Black feminist theory and sciences of technology, drawing on quotes by Marimba Ani, Sylvia Wynter, and N. K. Jemisin; these extracts serve as a way into (re)thinking about human relations with AI without falling into stereotypical fixations.

Part of AI (Ancestral Immediacies): Digital Twins and Data Doppelgangers, May 22 & 23, 2026.

Meeting point: Sylvia Wynter Foyer

In English