Data Bodies and Arab Futurisms with Laila Shereen Sakr

In this episode, we talk to digital media theorist and artist Laila Shereen Sakr, who also performs under the name VJ Um Amel. We discuss her work making data about the outer world both visible and emotional. We explore what Laila calls the "surveyed and targeted Arab data body" and the incredible work she does creating Arab futuristic video games that both represent Arab cultures and project them into the future. We hope you enjoy the show.

In this episode we talk to Kyla Wazana Tompkins, chair of the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality studies at the University of Buffalo. She gives incredible insight into the relationship between the history of science and the history of food law and policy. We look at legislation like the 1906 Food and Drug Act to examine how food policy shaped and was shaped by American ideas about race, national identity, and the body. From $40 LA smoothies to the fermentation practices of the Appalachian peoples, we explore how the way we eat is always bound up with race and gender, both in the past and in the present. 

To develop voice assistants like Siri and Alexa, companies spend years investigating what sounds like a human voice and what doesn't. But what we've ended up with is just one possibility of the kinds of voices that we could be interacting with. In this episode, we talked to sound engineer Frederik Juutilainen, and Assistant Professor at the University of Copenhagen, Stina Hasse Jørgensen, about their participation in [multi'vocal], an experimental research project that created an alternative voice assistant by asking people at a rock festival in Denmark to speak into a portable recording box. We talk about voice assistants' inability to stutter, lisp and code switch, and whether a voice can express multiple personalities, genders and ages. 

In this episode, we go shopping with artist and performer, Laura Allcorn. We enter into her practice, which is called the Institute for Comedic Inquiry, to learn how she pairs humour and entertainment with participatory public engagement methods to raise awareness about bizarre and dangerous uses of AI.  Laura uses comedy to skewer all manner of ethically questionable technologies, from gait surveillance to shopping algorithms. We participate in one of Laura's performances in this episode, 'SKU-MARKET', an algorithmic shopping platform that promises to know you better than you know yourself. Stay tuned for what the algorithm says about us...

In this episode, we talk to Anne Pasek, the Canada Research Chair in Media Culture and the Environment, and an Associate Professor between the Department of Cultural Studies and the School of the Environment at Trent University. We love Anne for lots of reasons, not least because she has a 50 watt solar panel, a little Raspberry Pi computer, and an acid battery, all in her backyard, hosting a server. Together we discuss pleasurable ways of responding to climate anxiety,  what would happen if the internet wasn't always on, but instead functioned in tandem with the sun, and why addressing climate crisis isn't necessarily about living with less, but learning to live in sync.

In this episode, we talk to Sarah Ciston, an artist, coder, writer, and critical AI scholar. We asked Sarah to talk about this badass chatbot they created called Ladymouth, which responds to trolls and incels on hate forums. We discussed the difficult labor of content moderation and the long lasting effects of trying to do feminist work online. We also talk about the surprising things that incels and feminists have in common and whether you can use AI to change people's minds and establish common humanity at scale. 

In this episode we talk to two activists, Hat and Nell, from the organisation Stop Oxevision, who are fighting against the rollout of surveillance technologies used on mental health wards in the United Kingdom (UK). We explore how surveillance on mental health wards affects patients who never know exactly when they're being watched, and how surveillance technologies in mental health wards are implemented within a much wider context of unequal power relationships. We also reflect on resistance, solidarity, and friendship as well as the power of activism to share information and combat oppressive technologies. Please note that this episode does contain distressing content, including references to self harm. 

In this episode, we talk to Sebastián Lehuedé, a Lecturer in Ethics, AI, and Society at King's College London. We talk about data activism in Chile, how water-intensive lithium extraction affects people living in the Atacama desert, the importance of reflexive research ethics, and an accidental Sunday afternoon shot of tequila. 

In this episode, we talked to Jill Walker Rettberg, Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen in Norway. In this wide-ranging conversation, we talk about machine vision's origins in polished volcanic glass, whether or not we'll actually have self-driving cars, and that famous photo-shopped Mother's Day Photo released by Kate Middleton in March, 2024. 

In this episode, we talk to Yasmine Boudiaf, a researcher, artist and creative technologist who uses technology in beautiful and interesting ways to challenge and redefine what we think of as 'good'. We discuss her wide-ranging art projects, from using AI to create a library of Mediterranean hand gestures through to her project Ways of Machine Seeing, which explored how machine vision systems are being taught to 'see'. Throughout the episode, we explore how Yasmine creatively uses technology to challenge the colonial gaze and the predominance of Western European ideas and concepts in ethics. Note: this episode was recorded in Summer 2023