Copy All: Zines as community responses to algorithmic culture
![Zines foto mit Pflanzen Zines foto mit Pflanzen](/resources/files/jpg1052/zines-formatkey-jpg-w320m.jpg)
Presented by UKAI & the Goethe-Institut Toronto
as part of the Goethe-Institut Toronto‘s Algorithmic Culture project
A zine is a self-published work of text and/or images often with a small circulation. Zine have historically been used to celebrate shared interests poorly covered through mainstream media or to describe lived experiences not reflected in popular culture. Zines often serve as responses to hegemonic discourses and celebrate difference and distributed authorship. As part of the Algorithmic Culture series, the Goethe-Institut Toronto has commissioned six zines --three from Canada and three from Germany-- to serve as a multi-nodal ‘program’ to accompany conversations throughout 2021-2022 around how automated systems are transforming how we live and how we as human beings are being shaped by the needs of these systems. The commissioned works range from children telling stories about their digital life to immigrant youth repurposing digital tools as sites of resistance to a multi-generational family living in a smart home.
What happens when zines are placed at the centre of a process of open socio-cultural sense-making? Rather than responses to worked-out narratives, might zines provide a starting point for exploring idiosyncratic experiences of the world around us? The underlying experience of AI can be hard to access as so much of it is invisible. We asked a diverse range of artists in Germany and Canada to make their and their community's point of view and lived experience visible so as to begin the process of mapping out local and lived responses to the automation of culture. Rather than abstracted debates centered in Western ethics, we are after what Neta Bomani calls "a technology to help further educate and organize our friends, family, and community by locating our distribution of selves across intersecting systems of power."
The zines will serve as both a digital and analog constellation of sense-making to inform ongoing programming aimed at the ethics and underlying experience of artificial intelligence in our lives.
Stay tuned for release announcements!
THE ARTISTS
![Jasmine Ghandtchi ZINE Jasmine Ghandtchi ZINE](/resources/files/png113/image001-v2-formatkey-png-default-m.png)
www.jasmine-ghandtchi.de
Jasmine Ghandtchi The Magic Typewriter.pdf
![Bianca Weeko Martin ZINE Bianca Weeko Martin ZINE](/resources/files/jpg1085/zine-a-formatkey-jpg-default-m.jpg)
www.biancaweekomartin.com
Bianca Weeko Martin_HOME SMART HOME.pdf
![Yasmeen Nematt Alla zine Yasmeen Nematt Alla zine](/resources/files/jpg1085/zime-formatkey-jpg-default-m.jpg)
yasmeennematt.com
Y.Nematt Alla-The Void's Song.pdf
![Alexandra Ruppert zine Alexandra Ruppert zine](/resources/files/jpg1085/zine-s-formatkey-jpg-default-m.jpg)
www.alexandraruppert.com
alexandra ruppert_poems by critters
![Shireen Norouzi Zine Shireen Norouzi Zine](/resources/files/jpg1085/zine-formatkey-jpg-default-m.jpg)
Details
Program Curator: Jutta Brendemühl
jutta.brendemuehl@goethe.de
Part of series ALGORITHMIC CULTURE: BODY/LAND/DIASPORA