News/Research

Alum Trevor Paglen in HKW Video Stop Making Sense

24 Feb, 2019

Alum Trevor Paglen in HKW Video Stop Making Sense

You can now watch the video of alum Trevor Paglen at HKW Berlin in conversation with Kate Crawford on whether Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are really the right metaphors to address training sets that feed into automated processes. The two delve into the production of training data and uncover the historical origins, labor practices, infrastructures, and epistemological assumptions, with biases and skews built into them from the outset.

Their conversation was part of Opening Days, which asked: are binary code, algorithms, and DNA the alphabets of today?

From the website:

The current explosion of knowledge is accompanied by the segmentation of the world into the smallest units. The binary code – with only two elements the greatest abstraction of the alphabetical principle – makes the polymorphism of the analog calculable. Projects in synthetic biology and artificial intelligence are based on an interpretation of life as code that can be decrypted and thus manipulated. How objective are data? How do they reproduce existing structures of power and property? What is suppressed? Who dominates the new order of knowledge? And which ethical questions are raised by these alphabetizations? What happens between 1 and 0?

Opening Days was the first iteration of The New Alphabet, a three year program at HKW, exploring utopias and dystopias.

Watch the video on the HKW website here and on Facebook here!