I'm honored to have been invited to return to my alma mater, Hunter College, to present my work in an Alumni Series lecture at the MFA building, 205 Hudson
Katherine Behar is an interdisciplinary artist and critical theorist of new media whose work explores gender and labor in digital culture. In contexts spanning automated labor, mandated obsolescence, big data, and machine learning, Behar applies object-oriented feminism into practice in her art and writing. Her work connects feminist and post-colonial histories with a wave of new theories that grapple with the nonhuman object world. This lecture presents examples of Behar's videos, interactive installations, sculptures, and performances, alongside episodes from media history and popular culture, all of which explore her core notion of being "digitally divided."
Hunter College MFA Alumni
Katherine Behar on being "Digitally Divided"
December 19, 2018
205 Hudson
New York, NY
More info: http://www.mfa205hudson.org/event/katherine-behar
I am very pleased to participate in a "What's Next?" Series RCA Arts & Humanities Talk at the Royal College of Art, London. The event, "What's Next? Distributed Intelligence & the Technosphere: speaking alt-truth to power," brings Johnny Golding, Katherine Behar, Lanfranco Aceti, and Martin Reinhart into conversation.
This panel reassesses one of the most troubling topics in contemporary art, technology and the wild sciences today: 'post-truth'. Taking cues from recent debates around dimensional plurality and non-locality -- not to mention the rise of drone consciousness and strategic populism -- we will examines the technologies of flesh, consciousness, atmosphere and dirt. Also subject to scrutiny is the age-old question of 'what does it mean to be human and what can this humanity become?'.
What's Next? Distributed Intelligence & the Technosphere
November 14, 2018
4:00-5:30 pm
Gorvy Lecture Theater
Dyson Building
1 Hester Road
SW11 4AN
London
I'm very excited to return to SLSA this fall, where I am organizing two panels on ARTIFICIAL IGNORANCE. I'm joined by a brilliant line up of speakers, Irina Aristarkhova, Jade Davis, Melissa Gregg, Orit Halpern, Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, Nathasha Dow Schull, and Sarah Sharma, who are generously helping me rethink and reframe AI.
Artificial Ignorance reframes "AI" so that we can discuss it in terms of ignorance, not intelligence. This two-panel stream adopts ignorance as an analytic tool and addresses how various concrete technologies at work in AI—in particular algorithmic decision-making and classification—produce limitations in knowledge, culture, politics, social relations, information, and the like.
Stressing intelligence suggests that AI works through objective, "pure" logical extensions, following an Enlightenment, modernist, colonial model of knowledge—which is to say, a model of knowledge that has been racist and sexist from the start. But in practice, AI most often performs division and limitation, not expansion, and it encodes subjectivity and bias, not objectivity. Moreover, the classification schemes and taxonomies that undergird AI algorithms are heir to racist, sexist, classist, and otherwise oppressively normative cultural systems of classification. These values are not only perpetuated, but calcified and propagated in and by code. All of this may be obscured by the ideal of "intelligence" itself.
By way of contrast, to foreground ignorance does not mean to embrace being ignorant. Nor does it mean to dismiss AI technologies for being ignorant, or as is often the case, inadequate to their tasks. Rather, engaging ignorance as an analytic device acknowledges how we—humans and our systems—are always ignorant of something. This more modest stance is in keeping with nonanthropocentric and object-oriented feminist ethics, and it challenges a basic assumption in engineering and dominant culture that being "all-knowing" is not only possible, but even desirable.
Out of Mind, SLSA 2018
November 15-18, 2018
Artificial Ignorance
Saturday, November 14, 2018
Panel 1 "(Machine) Learned Behaviors": 1:30 - 3:00 p.m.
Panel 2 "Gendering Automation / Automating Gender" 3:30 - 5:00 p.m.
Toronto Hilton
145 Richmond St W
Toronto, CANADA
More info: https://litsciarts.org/slsa18/
I'm pleased to return to Tuning Speculation, a favorite conference organized by The Occulture, this year relocated to Bloomington.
Auscultations | Occultations, Listening to the Occult
Tuning Speculation VI
November 2-4, 2018
The Back Door
207 S. College Ave
Bloomington IN 47404
More info: http://www.theocculture.net/tspec-vi-bloomington-edition/tuning-speculation-vi-schedule/
Disorientalism will return to ASU this fall to present the fourth chapter in our series "The Food Groups," a solo exhibition featuring video, animation, and objects.
A New Face presents a mash-up of the Sun-Maid Raisin Girl and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. This gallery installation explores migrant labor, aging, and the changing face of American agriculture. Recurring historical themes of debt and discrimination show the clash between the American dream of individuality and big corporate interests./p>
A New Faceis a project by Disorientalism, a decade-long collaboration between Asian-American artists Katherine Behar and Marianne M. Kim that studies the disorienting effects of technologized labor, junk culture and consumerism. A New Face is the fourth chapter in "The Food Groups," a five-part series of installation and performance works which embody five historical food industry trade characters of different races to explore race and labor in American industrialized food production and promotion.
The Food Groups: A New Face
Opening reception: October 10, 2018
Artspace West
4701 W. Thunderbird Road
Glendale, AZ 85306
More info: https://alumni.asu.edu/events/food-groups-new-face-1
I'm pleased to present a lecture for the "Alternating Facts" Fall Convergence at the University of Washington at Bothell's Creative Writing and Poetics MFA program.
Alternating Facts
September 29, 2018
9:00 AM - 6:00 PM PDT
North Creek Events Center NCEC UW Bothell
18225 Campus Way Northeast
Bothell, WA 98011
I'm honored to kick off the 2018/2019 Visiting Artist And Practitioner Series at UMass Amherst. I will present a lunchtime lecture on my work, "Digitally Divided," and conduct studio visits with MFA students in the Department of Art.
2018/2019 Visiting Artist And Practitioner Lecture Series
September 20, 2018
12:00 - 1:30
Studio Arts Building 240
Department of Art
Studio Arts Building
110 Thatcher Way
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Amherst MA 01003
More info: https://www.umass.edu/art/event/katherine-behar-20182019-visiting-artist-and-practitioner-series
http://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/article/visiting-artist-katherine-behar-opens-lecture
Image: Chris Jordan, Cellphones
"Digital Trash," curated by Jim Brown and Robert Eamons, will include two of my works, my installation E-Waste and my sculpture Data Cloud: A Heap, A Mass, A Rock, A Hill. The exhibition addresses the material impacts of digital technology and questions how we can create more sustainable digital practices.
I have also contributed an essay to the forthcoming catalogue. Details coming soon!
Digital Trash
September 5 - December 7, 2018
Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts
Stedman Gallery
314 Linden Street
Camden, NJ 08102
September-April Monday-Saturday 10am-5pm
More info: https://fas.camden.rutgers.edu/2018/09/04/new-rcca-exhibit-digital-trash-opens-sept-5/
In May, I am pleased to lead a working session for "Objects of Study: Methods and Materiality in Theatre and Performance Studies," organized by the PhD program in Theater at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.
The multiple potential meanings of "object" within theatre and performance studies point to questions about the relationship between knowledge and materiality. With this conference, we issue a challenge to the common understanding of scholarly work as focused on an "object of study." We seek to destabilize the terms "object" and "study" to explore how the ways in which we conceive of objects and materiality might influence the framework of our discipline. Are we, as scholars, engaging in acts of objectification? How do the objects also act upon us?
Through working sessions with Katherine Behar (Baruch, CUNY), Maaike Bleeker (Utrecht), Rebecca Schneider (Brown), and Soyoung Yoon (New School), we invite participants to reflect on the assumptions, connections, slippages, tensions, and politics implicit in both senses of the "object"--as thing and as focus of study--and to consider the implications of new materialist, post-human, and object-oriented thought within and on the field of theatre and performance studies itself. Does our relationship to performance change when the nonhuman performs? How might it lead us to productively re-think our field and reflexively transform our study practice? What methods and ideas might help us to complicate and explore the relationship between objects and knowledge in theatre and performance studies? If the conception of the object shifts, what can be known?
May 10, 2018
The Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
Segal Theatre
Performance 7:30 PM-9:30 PM
More info: https://dtsaconf.commons.gc.cuny.edu/
In April, I will visit Brown University, where I will present a keynote for "Earth(ly) Matters: New Directions in Environmental Humanities," a symposium organized by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. I will discuss my recent scholarly and creative research on environmental sensing and nonhuman sense.
More info: https://www.brown.edu/academics/humanities/earthly-matters-2018
In March I'm excited to travel to Lithuania where I'll be in residence at Nida Art Colony. I'll be working on a new project about environmental sensing as I explore the Curonian Spit!
More info: http://nidacolony.lt/en/residence
http://www.nidacolony.lt/en/1095-nida-a-i-r-in-march-2018
In February I'm honored to lecture on my artwork and Object-Oriented Feminism for the Colorado College Philosophy Colloquium, themed this year on "Feminisms and Peripheries."
Colorado College Philosophy Colloquium Lecture
February 8, 2018
3:30 p.m.
Gaylord Hall
Worner Center
Colorado Springs, CO
More info: https://www.coloradocollege.edu/academics/dept/philosophy/colloquia-series/
Anonymous Autonomous is a new interactive installation that will be the core of my upcoming solo exhibition in February 2018 at Robert Morris University.
I've worked with Tommy Martinez and David Sheinkopf in the Tech Lab at Pioneer Works where I'm currently in residence. My next stop will be a residency in January 2018 at RMU's Media Arts Department leading up to the exhibition.
Anonymous Autonomous is an interactive art installation that transforms office chairs into driverless cars. Through the motif of mobility, the project explores how deskilling and automation are undermining classically American values like freedom and individualism that have inspired car culture along with the rise of the creative class.
This project has received additional support from The MacDowell Colony and the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College, CUNY.
Stay tuned for details!
It's an honor and a pleasure to close out a fabulous month in India by speaking about my work at Clark House Initiative. I will be in conversation with Zasha Colah.
Please join us on January 7 at 6 PM.
Clark House Initiative
Ground Floor, Clark House
8 Nathalal Parekh Marg (Old Wodehouse Road)
opposite the Sahakari Bhandar and near Woodside Inn
Regal Cinema roundabout, Colaba, Bombay 400039
+919820213816
More info: http://clarkhouseinitiative.org/
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