Contemporary visual regimes are trending towards an infinite supply of digitally-twisted, fictitious, and discriminatory visual representations engineered for political, social, and cultural purposes.
The panel discussion brings together experts in different fields to identify various forms of embedded bias within our networked image cultures. How can we counter the perpetuation of bias? How can we infiltrate the opaque mechanisms upon which technological systems are built? What innovative approaches can we develop to strengthen inclusion, diversity, and sustainability in technology?
Mushon Zer-Aviv is a designer, researcher, educator and media activist based in Tel Aviv. His love/hate relationship with data informs his design work, art pieces, activism, research, teaching, workshops & city life. Among Mushon’s collaborations, he is the CO-founder of Shual.com – a foxy design studio; YouAreNotHere.org – a tour of Gaza through the streets of Tel Aviv; Kriegspiel – a computer game version of the Situationist Game of War; the Normalizing Machine – exploring algorithmic prejudice; the AdNauseam extension – clicking ads so you don’t have to; and multiple government transparency and civic participation initiatives with the Public Knowledge Workshop; Mushon also designed the maps for Waze.com and led the design of Localize.city. Mushon is an alumni of Eyebeam – an art and technology center in New York. He teaches digital media as a senior faculty member at Shenkar School of Engineering and Design. Previously he taught new media research at NYU and Open Source design at Parsons the New School of Design and in Bezalel Academy of Art & Design. Read him at Mushon.com and follow him at @mushon.
David Dao is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at ETH Zurich and founder of GainForest, a non-profit developing decentralized technology to reverse deforestation with pilot projects in South America and South-East Asia. His research focuses on ethical and sustainable artificial intelligence to restore the natural world. David collaborates with the United Nations and Indigenous Peoples to co-design machine learning algorithms and his research has been supported by multiple Microsoft AI for Earth grants and fellowships at UC Berkeley and Oasis Labs. David is a core member of Climate Change AI, a Global Shaper at World Economic Forum and a Climate Leader at Climate Reality. He is a former researcher at UC Berkeley and Stanford University.
Morgan G. Ames researches the ideological origins of inequality in the technology world, with a focus on utopianism, childhood, and learning. Her book
The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child (MIT Press, 2019), winner of the 2020 Best Information Science Book Award, draws on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in Paraguay to explore the cultural history, results, and legacy of the OLPC project - and what it tells us about the many other technology projects that draw on similar utopian ideals. Morgan is an Assistant Adjunct Professor in the School of Information and Associate Director of Research for the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society at the University of California, Berkeley.