Brought to you by Good Systems' Critical Surveillance Inquiry Research Focus Area, this panel brings together researchers, artists, and technologists that examine the social and ethical implications of surveillance technologies, both AI-enabled and not. From policing, drones, and the US-Mexico border, to gentrification, evictions, and data collection, this conversation will explore critical inquiry, innovations, and inventive approaches to imagining life beyond the surveillance state.
Simone Browne is Associate Professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also Research Director of Critical Surveillance Inquiry (CSI) with Good Systems, a research collaborative at the University of Texas at Austin.
She is currently writing her second book manuscript, Like the Mixture of Charcoal and Darkness, which examines the interventions made by artists whose works grapple with the surveillance of Black life, from policing, privacy, smart dust and the FBI’s COINTELPRO to encryption, electronic waste and artificial intelligence. Together, these essays and interviews explore the productive possibilities of rebellious methodologies and creative innovation when it comes to troubling surveillance and its various tactics, and imagining Black life beyond the surveillance state.
Iván Chaar López's research and teaching examines the politics and aesthetics of digital technologies. He is especially interested in the place of Latina/o/xs as targets, users, and developers of digital lifeworlds.
He is currently working on a book, under contract with Duke University Press, about the intersecting histories of electronic technology, unmanned aerial systems, and boundary making along the U.S.-Mexico border since the mid-twentieth century. This has led López to study how state and nonstate actors have sought to surveil migrant populations, especially ethnic Mexicans. As a result, these populations have played an unwitting central role in the development of various surveillance technologies of US empire.
Sam Lavigne is an artist and educator whose work deals with data, surveillance, cops, natural language processing, and automation. He has exhibited work at Lincoln Center, SFMOMA, Pioneer Works, DIS, Ars Electronica, the New Museum, the Whitney Museum and elsewhere. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Design at UT Austin.
In works like "White Collar Crime Risk Zones", "The Good Life", and "Infinite Campaign" I interrogate the critical role that data collection and surveillance play in the development of machine learning systems, and how these systems reinforce and bolster existing power structures.
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Erin McElroy is a postdoctoral researcher at New York University’s AI Now Institute, researching the digital platforms used by landlords that surveil, racialize, and evict tenants. Erin earned a doctoral degree in Feminist Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz with a project based on the politics of race, space, and gentrification in and between Romania and Silicon Valley. Erin is also cofounder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and the Radical Housing Journal, both projects committed to housing justice and intersections of research and tenant organizing.
Her current work focuses on the surveillance and AI systems embedded in landlord technology, or the digital platforms and infrastructure used by the real estate industry that abet processes of gentrification, speculation, and racial dispossession. To this end, McElroy leads a project, Landlord Tech Watch, to map landlord tech deployment and analyze its associated harms. Additionally, with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, she is codeveloping a tool to help counter technologies of displacement, Evictorbook, which empowers tenants with data about landlord portfolios, eviction histories, and ownership networks.
Tanya Clement studies the dynamic interplay of digital information systems and scholarly research in literary study by considering how the data, algorithms, software, platforms, and networks that comprise digital information systems are co-constructed with the services, practices, policies and theories that govern literary scholarship. Often working collaboratively, she leads teams to build and analyze digital information systems in the humanities, and uses the findings these activities generate to advance theory in critical cultural studies. Her work involves imagining what we don't know by evaluating and rethinking how scholars and institutions produce knowledge through the generation, curation, dissemination, and interpretation of literature as data in contexts that are constantly shifting due to rapidly changing cultures and technologies.
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