This week’s list of Furtherfield recommendations is a special list to coincide with Future Fair taking place in London tomorrow (Sat 10 Aug). It features highlights of stall-holder’s other works and collaborators, straddling the fields of art, technology and social change.

Calls for Participation

Collective Conditions Worksession

Collective Conditions is a worksession which experiments with the generative potential of codes of conduct, complaints procedures, bug reports and copyleft licenses. The worksession is inspired by trans*feminist collective practices, anti-harassment and allyship-work, non-violent communication, score-making, decolonial and intersectional activism, but also by ways of doing developed within Free Culture and Free, Libre and Open Source software. Collective Conditions focuses on a-polarizing methods, affirmative habits that can stretch and reorient frameworks, that represent new vocabulary, gestures and forms of expression.
Collective Conditions. Constant, Brussels from 8 to 16 November 2019
Deadline: 10 September 2019 https://bit.ly/31hUfSc

Femke Snelting, from Constant is at Future Fair with the Trans*Feminist Rendering Programme

Queering Damage 

A one-day workshop, to wonder together about the potential queer analytics of microbial, animal, plant, mineral, cosmological technoscience. Pondering the possibilities and limitation of informatics; and taking seriously the affective forces of nonhuman animals and machines. We ask how might we extend queer theories that concern personal injury into more- than- human ensembles in order to consider the damages shared by humans and nonhumans? How can we generate ways that take us beyond reparative narratives or benevolent utopianism towards more-than-human life?

With Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha and Laura Benítez in the framework of the Biennal del Pensament. Hosted by Hangar, Barcelona 

Deadline: 10 October 2019 https://bit.ly/31rz4NT

Helen Pritchard and Jara Rocha are at Future Fair with the Trans*Feminist Rendering Programme

Artworks, hacks and exhibitions

Data Union Fork: Tools for a Data Strike!

Artisan, educator and feminist hacker Larisa Blazic is exploring ways to reclaim individual data rights and establish collective ownership over data. She is devising and running a series of discursive workshops to explore and address wider accessibility by visualising process through “example mapping”. Workshop participants were invited to explore collective bargaining in labour union tradition and its possible hybridisation with DECODE project concepts. The video is directed and produced by Ilze Black. Watch the Data Union Fork Video https://bit.ly/2OJlPql

Lara Blazic is at Future Fair with Reading Minutes in the Park

F’xa

F’xa (Feminist Alexa) is a chatbot designed to provide the general public with a playful guide to AI bias. F’xa takes you through conversations about bias in search engines, recruitment algorithms and voice technology, and gives tips on how to tackle the problems. It was designed using the Feminist Internet’s Personal Intelligent Assistant standards, and Josie Young’s Feminist Chatbot Design Process. These ethical guidelines help designers ensure they don’t knowingly or unknowingly perpetuate gender inequality when building chatbots. https://f-xa.co/

The Feminist Internet is at Future Fair with Prototyping a People’s Park

Possible Bodies inventory

Femke Snelting and Jara Rocha are artists who carry out collaborative research on the very concrete and at the same time complex and fictional entities that “bodies” are, asking what matter-cultural conditions of possibility render them volumetrically present. This becomes especially urgent in contact with the technologies, infrastructures and techniques of 3D tracking, modelling and scanning. Intersecting issues of race, gender, class, species, age and ability resurface through these performative as well as representational practices. The research is concerned with genealogies of how bodies and technologies have been mutually constituted. It invites the generation of concepts and experimental renderings, wild combinations and digital and non-digital prototypes for different embodiments. https://bit.ly/2R610VL

Femke Snelting and Jara Rocha are at Future Fair with the Trans*Feminist Rendering Programme

Wealth Beyond Big Brother

A monetary system designed within the cultural context of George Orwell’s’ ‘Nineteen Eighty Four’ by Austin Houlsworth. Beyond the paternalistic control of big brother and between the super states of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, lie the disputed territories. Due to the continual change of ruler over these areas, no trusted financial institution has ever been established. Rather the people living within these areas have developed a payment system, which serves as both personal protection and a medium of exchange. This payment method embodies two ideas of value; on the one hand wealth and on the other life. The trader’s greed for gold is often tempered by the penultimate meaning of loss. https://bit.ly/2yIlf17 Austin Houldsworth also is the Co-founder and Curator of the Future of Money Design Awards http://futuremoneyaward.com/ 

Meet Austin Houldsworth with Martin Zeilinger on the Planet Cashless 2029 stall at Future Fair

We Need Us

We Need Us by artist Julie Freeman is a living artwork, powered by people, and influenced by data. It is a live, online, animated artwork that explores both ‘life data’ and the life of data. The work concentrates on metadata – data about data – which it draws from the activities of citizen science project, Zooniverse, to create sounds and animation. Unlike traditional data-visualisation which helps us understand and make sense of information held in large data sets, ‘We Need Us’ investigates the unique properties of the data itself. It asks: if the data had lives of their own, how would they be revealed? http://weneedus.org/

Julie Freeman and Hannah Redler Hawes at ODI commissioned Alisdair Gentry to create DoxBox Trustbot which will be featured at Future Fair

😹 LMAO

In these meme-fuelled, statistically ‘mythological’ times, data, and the algorithms that thrive on it, are often presented as a privacy-obliterating risk-based menace. But there are always two sides to a story: with so much potential to benefit our lives data can also be a force for good, as well as game for a laugh. https://bit.ly/2YF2ydt LMAO Is an ODI Exhibition curated in 2018 (and well worth revisiting) by Julie Freeman and Hannah Redler Hawes. They also commissioned Alisdair Gentry to create DoxBox Trustbot which will be featured at Future Fair

Featured image 

Possible Bodies XYZ http://www.fictional-journal.com/xyz/