Emily Mast & Yehuda Duenyas
This eighth SDUK broadsheet takes MEDIATING as its theme, in parallel with the Blackwood’s virtual program Running with Concepts: The Mediatic Edition, to consider sites and practices of mediation in culture, technology, and media. Following SDUK07: TILTING (an urgent 2-part issue in response to the first wave of COVID-19), the series returns for 2021—albeit in a form that continues to be shaped by the effects of the pandemic—and launches simultaneously on the Blackwood website.
For those who wonder, how are mediated circumstances changing our ways of relating and predicting?, excerpts from Tommy Pico’s book-length poem Junk offer a riotous convergence of land, love, and queer sexuality against the ever-looming backdrops of climate change, fascism, and settler colonialism. Reckoning with futurity in his continued engagement with economics, D.T. Cochrane critiques economic forecasting’s failure to model for uncertainty.
With tech companies holding monopolies on internet infrastructures, some readers may wonder: What forms of technology critique and dissent are needed? A panel discussion with Meredith Broussard, Beth Coleman, and Shalini Kantayya reflects on the biases amplified in artificial intelligence and facial recognition technologies; while Taeyoon Choi warns against repeating the inaccessible, racially-homogenous, and male-dominated norms of tech companies within the emergence of the distributed web. Mike Pepi’s Elements of Technology Criticism aims to set baseline principles for broad-scale technology critique, and his accompanying essay reflects on a recent workshop where participants co-wrote and annotated responses to his text.
Readers may also be asking, what are the alternatives to status-quo technologies? HOW ARE WE (a project with over two dozen contributors) uses blockchain to upend conventional ownership and authorship—their contract is reproduced here in full to model the inventive nature of this alternative. Beyond the pages of this broadsheet, we continue to learn from artist and activist projects that map alternatives to oppressive practices in the technology industry: from Julian Oliver’s HARVEST—which harnesses wind power to mine cryptocurrency in support of climate-change research—to a recent open letter from Black in Computing examining how systemic racism has perniciously impacted all facets of tech culture, offering measures for building more equitable practices in computing.
Considering the long, historical continuum within which contemporary technologies operate, some may wonder: How can we resist and refuse harmful data practices? An artist project by Tiara Roxanne visualizes “data colonialism” as an ongoing practice of extraction; while Stephanie Syjuco’s work intervenes in archival images of colonial exhibitions. The Feminist Data Manifest-No offers an expansive set of refusals and commitments to reframe how data is used, collected, shared, analyzed, and mobilized.
As we magnify many facets of data and technology throughout the issue, readers might still wonder whose voices get overlooked in cultures of science, policy, and technology? The Great Silence, a short story by Ted Chiang, considers how non-human beings are ignored amid Promethean human ambitions; while Constance Hockaday’s Artists-in-Presidents reappropriates the centralized power of the Head of State in favour of a polyvocal chorus of speeches, poems, portraits, and performances.
As in each broadsheet, we close with a glossary to clarify, complicate, and upend terms within the issue. Explore our newly launched glossary tool, which serves as a guide to concepts that underpin creative practices and global issues throughout the Blackwood’s ongoing work.