CRUNCH: Recursive Imminences

Machine learning reproduces the injustices of the world from which it has learned. Algorithmic logics perpetuate Western colonialism through the extraction of minerals from Africa and Latin America for energy and component production, through racial and gender profiling in databases, through knowledge structures that prioritise Western ideas, and through data propriety that reinforces global power relations between the Global North and South.

What is less understood is how machine learning traverses the real and the virtual to reproduce and morph injustice and impact our shared but different worlds.

In this seminar, disruptive thinkers Ramon Amaro and Tiziana Terranova examine how recursivity can illuminate our imminent crises and inform our understanding of how architecture might respond.

The conversation will be chaired by Paola Camasso.

This event is part of the flagship CRUNCH Series at the Bartlett School of Architecture.

Please note this event has limited capacity and operates on a first-come, first-served basis. Doors close at 18:40.

Tiziana Terranova is Professor in Cultural Studies and Digital Media in the Dipartimento di Scienze Umane e Sociali at the Università di Napoli "L'Orientale", Italy. Her research concerns the intersection between science, technology, communication and culture from the perspective of critical theory and cultural studies. She is author of Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (Pluto Press, 2004), After the Internet: Digital Networks between Capital and the Common (Semiotext(e)/MIT Press, 2022) and the forthcoming Network Social: On the Return of the Social in the Post-Digital Age (University of Minnesota Press). She is a member of the editorial boards of Theory, Culture and Society (Sage), Media Theory, Subjectivity (Palgrave) and Studi Culturali (Il Mulino). She is also a member of the Centre for Postcolonial and Gender Studies at L'Orientale, and co-founder of the Critical Computation Bureau and the Centro di Ricerca Interuniversitario sulle Tecnoculture Transnazionali (CRiTT).

Ramon Amaro is Senior Researcher for Digital Culture and Lead Curator of -1, the testing ground and innovation hub for new tools, methods and public uses of digital culture at Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. His writings, research and artistic practice emerge at the intersections of Black Study, digital culture, psychosocial study and the critique of computational reason. He holds a BSc in Mechanical Engineering, an MA in Sociology and a PhD in Philosophy of Technology. Before joining Nieuwe Instituut, he worked as Lecturer in Art and Visual Cultures of the Global South at UCL, Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, Engineering Programme Manager at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and Quality Design Engineer at General Motors Corporation. His book, The Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being (Sternberg Press, 2023), examines the nature of programming and mathematics and the deep incursion of racial hierarchy to inspire alternative approaches to contemporary algorithmic practice.

Paola Camasso teaches history and theory of architecture at the University of Greenwich. She is a PhD candidate in Architectural and Urban History and Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, where her research seeks to construct a feminist and decolonial materialist critique of logic as it operated within 20th-century architectural and computational histories.

Image: Fractal Africa Tessellation by Hamid Naderi Yeganeh, UCL Mathematics PhD student. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher The Bartlett School of Architecture