The Trouble with Visibility

Ramon Amaro explores how the history of data and statistical analysis provide a clear (and often sudden) grasp of the complex relationship between race and machine learning.

Amaro juxtaposes a practical analysis of machine learning with a theory of Black alienation in order to inspire alternative approaches to contemporary algorithmic practice. In doing so, Amaro offers a continuous contemplation on the abstruse nature of machine learning, mathematics, and the deep incursion of racial hierarchy.

Ramon Amaro’s writing, research and practice emerge at the intersections of Black Study, psychopathology, digital culture, and the critique of computation reason. He draws on Frantz Fanon’s theory of sociogenic alienation to problematise the de-localisation of the Black psyché in contemporary computational systems, such as machine learning and artificial intelligence.

His recent book The Black Technical Object aims to introduce the history of statistical analysis and a knowledge of sociogenesis – a system of racism amenable to scientific explanation – into machine learning research as an act of impairing the racial ordering of the world.

While machine learning – computer programming designed for taxonomic patterning – provides useful insight into racism and racist behavior, a gap is present in the relationship between machine learning, the racial history of scientific explanation, and the Black lived experience.

Tiara Roxanne’s

work contends that AI is colonial in creation and nature, as its invention is founded on a settler colonial paradigm. In acknowledging this certainty, she states I cannot decolonize my body and performs as an incantation of survival and ancestral reconciliation. In performance, Roxanne is (dis)entangled within material and digital colonial borders of the past, present and future.

As part of an ongoing project entitled Red, through performance Tiara Roxanne will illustrate the relationship between Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Indigeneity.

By reinterpreting processes of colonial recovery through a performative and critical lens, Roxanne suggests that we will arrive at sovereign, Indigenous notions of digital borders, data colonialism and storytelling.

Tiara Roxanne

Tiara Roxanne is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Data & Society in NYC. They are a Tarascan Mestiza scholar and artist based in Berlin. Their research and artistic practice investigates the encounter between Indigeneity and AI by interrogating colonial structures embedded within machine learning systems.  As a performance artist and practitioner, Roxanne works between the digital and the material using textile. Currently their work is mediated through the color red.

Roxanne has presented at Images Festival (Toronto), Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center (NY), Trinity Square Video (Toronto),  European Media Art Festival (Osnabrück), University of Applied Arts (Vienna),  SOAS (London), SLU (Madrid), Transmediale (Berlin), Duke University (NC), Tech Open Air (Berlin), AMOQA (Athens), Zurich University of the Arts (Zurich), Autonomous Intercultural Indigenous University (Columbia), Utrecht University (NL), University of California (San Diego), Münchener Kammerspiele (Munich),  Laboratorio Arte Alameda, (Mexico City),  among others.

Moderation by Nelly Y. Pinkrah

Nelly Y. Pinkrah is a cultural and media theorist and political activist, mainly involved in anti-racist, empowerment, and community-building projects. Areas of interest: (digital) media and technology, black studies & black feminist theory, political thoughts and practices, and cultural history.