Sheltering Places Season 02 Episode 04. June 23, 2020 by The New Centre for Research & Practice

On June 23 at 12 ET / 18 CET The New Centre aired the fourth episode of our public program Sheltering Places, titled "Computational Risk & Algorithmic Horizons" with guests Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Nora Khan, moderated by The New Centre Researcher Martina Cavalot. The topic of discussion will be on machine-vision & machine-speech, software neutrality, and algorithmic violence.

Since the emergence of media theory, art discourse has struggled to incorporate criticism when considering technological interventions across different geographies and scales. The proliferation of digital surveillance and predictive software has fostered the myth of code as an impartial and neutral agent, which is only beginning to be publicly dispelled. With this conversation, we will try to individuate the space for a computation that exceeds the dynamic of the calculus and harness its tools to examine the possibilities for the ethical deployment of algorithmic arbitration. In addressing machine-vision and machine-speech across law and order, we will consider questions of form, matter and process to parse how different conceptual apparatuses are mobilized in the making of computational meaning and how this affects the horizon of the human.

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Sheltering Places first emerged as a response to the sudden disappearance of social interactions such as small talk at parties and heated discussions after lectures and conferences that all of us have been avoiding now in the hope of stopping the spread of COVID-19. Following the success of our previous season, we decided to continue compensating for this loss of casual exchange of ideas by creating online spaces that allow for a variety of conversation topics. As an online institution that has experimented with many different forms of knowledge production and communication across the globe since 2014, The New Centre can put this experience to use in the service of public good. As we confront the sense of urgency that pervades our world, Sheltering Places is meant to be a place for discussing and thinking together. We provide a Zoom-based format to stage informal conversations between invited guests while facilitating active contributions by a diverse community composed of The New Centre’s Instructors, Researchers, Students, and Members.

We are now several months into the COVID-19 pandemic and the future seems more uncertain than ever before. Building on the previous season, Sheltering Places will turn to look beyond and beside the pandemic while remaining attuned to its reality. The variable political, social and physical constraints that the current situation imposes also foreground the importance of thinking about other kinds of change - rapid and unexpected, slow and expected, etc - that may or may not be tied directly to the immediacy of COVID-19. The second season of Sheltering Places will confront a broad range of weekly themes pertaining to current plights and future uncertainties from different philosophical, theoretical, and cultural angles to discuss and deploy ideas that tie local particularities to a global discussion. With this, we hope to contribute to emerging vocabularies for speaking about recent and upcoming changes to social and political life in the purview of art, philosophy and politics.

The second season of Sheltering Places will remain an opportunity for informal discussion, but each session will have a smaller number of panelists to allow them to articulate their thoughts in more depth and to leave more time for questions from viewers.