Son[i]a #238
Zach Blas
Zach Blas draws on a series of sculptural, performative, audiovisual, and essay strategies and multiplies the subjects of his research in the form of teaching and writing, in an artistic practice in which contemporary security technologies collide with minority political demands.
His long-term projects respond to facial recognition biometrics, explore queer technological prototypes to dismantle age-old patriarchal and militarised narratives, and dispute the meteoric rise of the internet, understanding it as a surface on which the new capture strategies used by governments and corporations are, by definition, usually resolved. His work stakes out a prolific confluence zone between sci-fi speculation and urgent struggles, between denunciation and imagination.
SON[I]A talks to Zach Blas about utopian plagiarism, life patterns, and unthinkable moments; about identity, opacity, and paranodes; about speculation understood in terms of usefulness, and about how we can go about conceiving sensual alternatives to the internet’s total mono-narrative today.
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Joana Moll
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Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with Ramon Amaro that we were unable to include the first time around. Ramon Amaro is a lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, London, and also in the Centre for Research Architecture. His work revolves around speculative articulations in machine learning, philosophies of being, mathematics, engineering, and black ontology.
Martin Zeilinger
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Femke Snelting
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Helen Pritchard
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Nanna Thylstrup
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Ramon Amaro
The researcher and lecturer Ramon Amaro introduces the basics of machine learning, its criteria for assigning value, the collision between blackness and the artificial, its flaws, and the problem of impunity that all too often accompanies them. He also calls for a techno-resistance that would require us to sacrifice our current view of the world and of ourselves.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Zach Blas that we were unable to include the first time around.
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