Pushkin House invites you to an open conversation with Manu Luksch & Mukul Patel, creators of a new artist-guided walk – HEAR/HERE TO SEE – that shines light on the increasing prevalence of automated decision making systems in urban space and daily life. The 1.5km route narrates the buildings and public spaces around London’s Westminster through a conversation about the algorithms that can be encountered there, from the bell tower of the Abbey to street traffic lights, and from law courts to the Home Office. The project aims to stimulate public critique of the surveillance and management systems that are poised to dominate our lives.
Networked digital technologies have transformed how people engage with information over the past decades – and increasingly so as a result of the pandemic. But this transformative potential to create and share information also bears a number of risks. Important questions arise as the spread of computation to all aspects of individual and collective life makes us legible to machines. With this legibility comes vulnerability – to analytic algorithms that claim to classify us and nudge engines that steer our cognition and behaviour.
Whether in the context of a hot war or the cooler competition of the consumer marketplace, our ability to make informed decisions, to act effectively, and even to imagine the world differently has been severely impacted. Yet, we each have access to tools, protocols and processes of unprecedented power and plasticity, with which we can respond and reshape our world. So, what is to be done?
The artists will be joined in this discussion by Dr Seeta Gangadharan, the founder of Our Data Bodies and Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
HEAR/HERE to SEE was commissioned for the City Songlines app and will be freely available from the Apple Store.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Artist-filmmaker Manu Luksch and composer-mathematician Mukul Patel have been researching the effects of emerging technologies on daily life, social relations, urban space, and corporate-governmental relationships for over 20 years. Although their projects grow on an electronic substrate, the concern with regulation extends beyond the digital domain to the legal status of image data, ethics in AI, and the language of instruction. Their work is shown internationally at film festivals, conferences, galleries and performance venues.
Dr Seeta Peña Gangadharan is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her work focuses on inclusion, exclusion, and marginalization, as well as questions around democracy, social justice, and technological governance. She currently co-leads two projects: Our Data Bodies, which examines the impact of data collection and data-driven technologies on members of marginalized communities in the United States, and Justice, Equity, and Technology, which explores the impacts of data-driven technologies and infrastructures on European civil society. She is also a visiting scholar in the School of Media Studies at The New School, Affiliated Fellow of Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, and Affiliate Fellow of Data & Society Research Institute.
In collaboration with Grad, supported by Arts Council England.
