Themes Cultures – Histories and Futures Curating on the Move SITUATED KNOWLEDGES – Art and Curating on the Move Workshop 13: Emancipating Alexa

Workshop 13: Emancipating Alexa

With Maayan Sheleff (PhD researcher, Curating, ZHdK) and Ruth Patir

Date

Sunday, 27 June 2021

Time

1:00–4:00pm CEST / 7:00–10:00pm HKT

Location

Zoom

Maximum number of Participants

20

Registration

Please register until 24th June 2021 with your university’s account.

Description

This workshop will experiment with the agency of the female voice, inspired by Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto and Situated Knowledges. It will survey the historical use of the female body and voice as a vehicle for technology, and particularly as the voice of the digital personal helper. We will glimpse at the representation of the female-robot or virtual being in films and artworks. We will look at fragments from multi disciplinary texts discussing the female voice and the fear from it (Dolar, Freud, Haraway, Lacan, Spivak, Zizek).The participants will then be asked to write a text to the otherwise incarcerated and abstracted female voices of Siri, Alexa and Cortana, situating them in a new embodied narrative. What will happen to the supposedly objective, polite, “personal helper”, when charged with different voices? what happens in the moment of knowledge embodiment, and can embodied knowledge be heard from an entity that has no body?

About the Speakers

Maayan Sheleff (PhD in Practice in Curating, ZHdK)

Ruth Patir