Events
Art, Tech & Culture

In Search for My Robot: Emergent Media, Racialized Gender, and Creativity

Art, Tech & Culture
24 Feb, 2020

In Search for My Robot: Emergent Media, Racialized Gender, and Creativity

with Margaret Rhee
Assistant Professor, SUNY Buffalo; Visiting Scholar, NYU

An Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium, co-sponsored by the Department of Ethnic Studies and the Department of Comparative Literature, presented with Berkeley Arts + Design as part of Arts + Design Mondays.

Robots, like any technology, are not "objective" or "universal"; Instead, machines reveal the process of social formation. This talk demonstrates how difference--such as race, gender, and sexuality--are shaped by and co-constitutive with technological developments. Specifically, this talk illustrates how the robot is a primary locus of racialization for Asian Americans within modernity’s distinction between humans and machines.

Drawing from examples such as nineteenth century editorial cartoons of Chinese automatons, the 1960s robotic art of artist Nam June Paik, and contemporary developments of artificial intelligence, this lecture introduces the concept of the Asian and/as Automaton. While the machine demarcates racialized gender, Asian American artists have also recalibrated race by way of the robot. Through new media and creative interventions, the robot also offers possibilities of freedom. Not only has race been shaped by technology, but technology has always been imbued with the politics of difference.

About Margaret Rhee

Margaret Rhee is a poet, scholar, and new media artist. She is the author of Love, Robot, named a 2017 Best Book of Poetry by Entropy Magazine and awarded a 2018 Elgin Award by the Science Fiction Poetry Association and the 2019 Best Book Award in Poetry by the Asian American Studies Association. Her poetry chapbooks include Yellow and Radio Heart; or, How Robots Fall Out of Love, and forthcoming collection Poetry Machines: A Letter to a Future Reader, a collection of lyrical essays on poetry, and the intersections of cinema, art, and new media. Currently, she is completing her monograph How We Became Human: Race, Robots, and the Asian American Body. She was a College Fellow in Digital Practice in the English Department at Harvard University and a member of MetaLab @ Harvard. She received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in ethnic studies with a designated emphasis in new media studies. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Study at SUNY Buffalo and co-leads Palah 파랗 Light Studios, a creative space for poetry, participation, and pedagogy through technology.

About the Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium

Founded by Prof. Ken Goldberg in 1997, the ATC lecture series is an internationally respected forum for creative ideas. Always free of charge and open to the public, the series is coordinated by the Berkeley Center for New Media and has presented over 200 leading artists, writers, and critical thinkers who question assumptions and push boundaries at the forefront of art, technology, and culture including: Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, Sophie Calle, Bruno Latour, Maya Lin, Doug Aitken, Pierre Huyghe, Miranda July, Billy Kluver, David Byrne, Gary Hill, and Charles Ray.

Fall 2019 - Spring 2020 Series Theme: Robo-Exoticism

Monday Evenings, 6:30-8:00pm
Osher Theater, BAMPFA, Berkeley, CA
http://atc.berkeley.edu/

Presented with Berkeley Arts + Design as part of Arts + Design Mondays.

2019

09/09 Robots Are Creatures, Not Things
Madeline Gannon, Artist / Roboticist, Pittsburgh, PA
Co-sponsored by the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation and CITRIS People and Robots (CPAR)

09/23 The Copper in my Cooch and Other Technologies
Marisa Morán Jahn, Artist, Cambridge, MA and New York, NY
Co-sponsored by the Wiesenfeld Visiting Artist Lecture Series and the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation

10/21 Non-Human Art
Leonel Moura, Artist, Lisbon
Co-sponsored by the Department of Spanish & Portuguese and CITRIS People and Robots (CPAR)

11/4 Transience, Replication, and the Paradox of Social Robotics
Guy Hoffman, Robotics Researcher, Cornell University
Co-sponsored by the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies and CITRIS People and Robots (CPAR)

2020

01/27 Dancing with Robots: Expressivity in Natural and Artificial Systems
Amy LaViers, Robotics, Automation, and Dance (RAD) Lab
Co-sponsored by the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies and CITRIS People and Robots (CPAR)

02/24 In Search for My Robot: Emergent Media, Racialized Gender, and Creativity
Margaret Rhee, Assistant Professor, SUNY Buffalo; Visiting Scholar, NYU
Co-sponsored by the Department of Ethnic Studies and the Department of Comparative Literature

03/30 The Right to Be Creative
Margarita Kuleva, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow
Invisible Russia: Participatory Cultures, Their Practices and Values
Natalia Samutina, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow
Co-sponsored by the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature and Department of the History of Art and the Arts Research Center

04/06 Artist Talk
William Pope.L, Artist
Presented by the Department of Art Practice

04/13 Teaching Machines to Draw
Tom White, New Zealand
Co-sponsored by Autolab and CITRIS People and Robots (CPAR)

For updated information, maps, please see:

http://atc.berkeley.edu/

Contact: info.bcnm [​at​] berkeley.edu, 510-495-3505

ATC Director: Ken Goldberg
BCNM Director: Abigail De Kosnik
Arts + Design Director: Shannon Jackson
BCNM Liaisons: Lara Wolfe, Sophia Hussain

ATC Highlight Video from F10-S11 Season (2 mins)
http://j.mp/atc-highlights-hd

ATC Audio-Video Archive on Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive:
http://tinyurl.com/atc-internet-archive

ATC on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/cal-atc

ATC on Twitter:
https://www.twitter.com/cal_atc

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