Event overview
The starting point for this presentation is a proposition: AI, and its attendant large-scale data processing techniques, have radically transformed contemporary processes of racialisation. The algorithmic forms of sorting, identification, and classification mobilised by AI rely on what Thao Phan and I have elsewhere called “proxy logics”: data processing that uses implicit feedback and complex statistics to sort individuals into contingent groupings or clusters. Subject to these techniques, we are racialised not on the basis of how we look (via phenotype or genotype) or what we do (our cultures), but via latent associations between features of data, or proxy indicators.
If race is transformed by proxy logics, what might an anti-racist project tuned to resist AI’s discriminatory effects look like? The second part of this presentation picks up this question by probing the limits of “recognition” by AI-driven systems.
The classifications that AI systems produce are arguably incommensurable with (political) recognition. The inferences and approximations drawn by AI create clusters that group us together on the basis of our data’s proximity to, or distance from, other users. Rather than recognising us in our difference, or remaining sensitive to our identities, such systems can only offer an a-political, technical kind of recognition: that injecting a greater quantity of (racialised) data into a system might balance out its discriminatory effects. Recognition is a technical fix that offers big tech an easy alibi. This presentation will argue that an identity politics equal to the task of resisting race constituted by proxy requires something else: a “politics of proximity.”
Scott Wark is a Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths University. His research combines an interest in theoretical approaches to media and culture with analyses of digital cultural phenomena, media infrastructures, data processing, artificial intelligence, and techniques of racialisation. He is co-editor of Figure: Concept and Method (with Celia Lury and William Viney; Palgrave, 2022) and 'Pharmacologies of Media,' a special issue of Media Theory (w. Yiğit Soncul).
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 30 Jan 2025 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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