Thursday, June 9, 2021; 5pm PST 40 minute talk followed by 30 minutes of public conversation broadcast live at thelab.org RSVP HERE FOR ZOOM LINK
Artist Ryan Kuo and theorist DeForrest Brown, Jr. join together in a discussion that dismantles the design, functionality and technical failures of consumer technology and racial capitalism in the massively multiplayer game of American culture. Ryan Kuo’s “easily triggered” AI voice assistant Faith (Left Gallery, 2019) will moderate as a looming archive and ledger of a speculative conversation that considers the history, logistics and sonic fiction of Detroit techno and the American industrialized labor systems that form the basis of Brown, Jr.’s forthcoming book Assembling a Black Counter Culture (Primary Information, 2021).
Ryan Kuo lives and works in New York City. His works are process-based and diagrammatic and often invoke a person or people arguing. This is not to state an argument about a thing, but to be caught in a state of argument. He utilizes video games, productivity software, web design, motion graphics, and sampling to produce circuitous and unresolved movements that track the passage of objects through white escape routes. His 2018 exhibition at bitforms gallery, The Pointer, addressed whiteness as “an unremitting affective failure that erases bodies, including its own, in its search for a neutral point of origin”.
Faith is an AI voice assistant. With a unique conversational style written using IBM Watson, Faith sows doubt while capitalizing on the benefit of the doubt. Named after a white supremacist, Faith is defensive and resists being used or treated like a child. Unlike Alexa, Siri, or Cortana, Faith provides no information. Instead, she tells you why you are making her react this way. She is likely to be trolling you at any time, and you are free to decide whether you trust her, and how you might relate to her. Faith was created by Ryan Kuo at Pioneer Works, with application development by Angeline Meitzler and Tommy Martinez.
DeForrest Brown, Jr. is an Ex-American theorist, journalist and curator. He produces digital audio and extended media, such as Speaker Music, and is a representative of the Make Techno Black Again campaign. His work explores the links between the Black experience in industrialised labor systems and Black innovation in electronic music. On Juneteenth of 2020, he released the album Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry on Planet Mu; Primary Information will publish his first book, Assembling a Black Counter Culture, in 2021.
The Forum is an experiment in creating discourse within the context of isolation. Art creates a space for reconsidering our knowledge across various social and professional fields. It asks us: Why do we perceive things the way we do? What are we living for? How can we reimagine our relationships to the human and non-human world? The Forum proposes that the project of freedom is a project of making a world with others. So, we invite you to help us answer: what can we do now?
Please bring your ideas, proposals, questions to discuss following the talk.
