BYOW Workshop: Build Your Own Words to Resist Algorithmic Censorship

Wednesday 22 September, 18:00-20:00 CEST, Online

With: Xiaowei R. Wang (Artist, Writer, Organizer & Coder, US) and Qianqian Ye (Artist, CN/US)

Online workshop | Language: English
Tickets: €5 - limited seats – via https://pretix.eu/disruptionlab/byow

Warming up to our 24th conference POWERS OF TRUTH: China, Tech, Art & Resistance (1-3 October, Studio 1, Kunstquartier Bethanien & online), in this online workshop we’ll experiment with creative ways to resist the ever-increasing algorithmic censorship online, using the Hanzimaker and other parts of the Algorithmic Censorship Toolkit developed by Future of Memory. What is the new vocabulary we need for different kinds of revolution?

BYOW Workshop: Build Your Own Words to Resist Algorithmic Censorship

The very words we use to communicate, learn, debate, and critique have become compromised by opaque algorithmic organisation and optimisation, and the market-driven profits of private companies such as Google. We might therefore ask ourselves, just how resilient and secure is language in the digital age? Whether in the US, in China, or globally, online language has become the medium in which activism arises. Language has also become a form of data, ready to be co-opted, used to create machine learning systems for profit, such as words for training data that form AI models that can “write.” Words have also become an arena for automated censorship and moderation.

Writing has long been a form of dissent and provocation. Words can destroy worlds or create new worlds. Our new languages will be prismatic in nature, subject to the multiple, relational and transnational ways of expression.

In this workshop, participants will use the Hanzimaker and other parts of the Algorithmic Censorship Toolkit by Future of Memory to experiment with creating new words, phrases, and vocabularies to document the past and think through the future. These new hybrid characters, a mash of multiple languages, just as diasporic as their creators will escape classification and recognition by automated systems.

What words will we be left with to describe the past? What words will build our future? What is the new vocabulary we need for different kinds of revolution?

• Prerequisites / preparation:
  no experience required

Workshop leaders

Xiaowei R. Wang is an artist, writer, organizer and coder. Their collaborative project FLOAT Beijing created air quality-sensing kites to challenge censorship and was an Index Design Awards finalist. Other projects have been featured by the New York Times, BBC, CNN, VICE and elsewhere. Their most recent project, The Future of Memory, was a recipient of the Mozilla Creative Media Award. They are the author of the book Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech In China's Countryside and one of the lead facilitators of Logic School, an organizing community for tech workers.

Qianqian (Q) Ye (she/they) is a Chinese artist, creative technologist, and educator based in Los Angeles (Gabrielino-Tongva Land). Trained as an architect, she creates digital, physical, and social spaces exploring issues around gender, immigrants, power, and technology. She received a Master of Landscape Architecture from Cornell University. She currently teaches creative coding at USC Media Arts + Practice and serves as a p5.js co-lead at Processing Foundation.

Funded by: Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa (Senate Department for Culture and Europe, Berlin), Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung, the Reva and David Logan Foundation (Grant provided by NEO Philanthropy). Supported [in part] by a Grant from the Foundation Open Society Institute in cooperation with the OSIFE of the Open Society Foundations.