Workshop given by Flavia Dzodan with the Radio Web MACBA Working Group
Under the umbrella of the European project, Education from Below, this meeting aims to cross the dynamics of collective learning and thinking by doing of the Radio Web MACBA Working Group with the research projects of the writer and academic Flavia Dzodan, who will share her dissection of the taxonomic coloniality, which places Carl Linnaeus’s project of the classification of the living world, developed in the 18th century, as an early colonial algorithm, as well as the ongoing research on “Beauty and the Machine”, which closely follows the use of algorithms in curatorial practices and aesthetic categorisations.
Flavia Dzodan is a writer and cultural critic based in Amsterdam. She is a senior researcher and lecturer at the Rietveld Academie - Sandberg Instituut. Her research is focused on the politics of artificial intelligence and algorithms at the intersections of colonialism, race and gender. In her research, Dzodan examines the ways that technology is created and deployed to reproduce historical patterns of cultural reproduction. Her current research on “Beauty and the Machine” attempts to understand how cultural analytics would operate vis-à-vis semiotic codes, particularly in regard to teaching machines, to identify highly subjective and culturally dependent ontologies, such as what constitutes beauty, as well as teaching algorithms curatorial skills based on aesthetic categories. This current research is a continuation of her previous research on “the coloniality of the algorithm” that situated Linnaean taxonomies at the heart of both colonial history and our contemporary uses of technology. She is the editor of the blog The Research Papers, where she has written about the rise of the alt-right, big data, networks, algorithms and community surveillance. She has been published in Dissent Magazine, The Guardian and The Washington Post, among others.
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