C/CHANGE - Key Persons
Dr. Elia Vargas is an artist and scholar working across multiple mediums, ranging from video and sound to writing and performance. His work is critical, speculative, ecological, energetic, and technocultural. It is engaged in an interdisciplinary approach with contemporary and historical experimental media, digital cultural, and feminist science studies. Vargas collaborates widely with artists, musicians, and institutions. He holds a PhD from UC Santa Cruz. He is currently a lecturer at CSU Monterey Bay and is co-founder of the SF Bay Area art and technology organization, the Living Room Light Exchange.
Dylan Baker is an engineer and researcher currently advocating for and building toward more just algorithmic futures at the Distributed AI Research Institute. In this interview, they sketch out alternative pathways for AI development that weave together different ways of knowing and that value building with the communities that stand to be impacted by emerging technologies. Read on to learn more from Dylan about their strategies for effectively and transparently communicating technical ideas and for reducing harms propagated by biased AI systems.
Dylan Baker: I'm Dylan, and I'm a research engineer at the Distributed AI Research Institute. I went to an engineering school where I studied machine learning and computer science. I ended up at Google working on a team that did experimental machine learning product development. The team was half research, half engineering. I did a lot of data work, model evaluation, and integrating models into different experimental products. But I really wanted to get involved in ML fairness. After a few years, I joined the Ethical AI team to do data engineering, which is when I got involved in research. The team was amazing, they were incredible to work with and I learned so much. But then, in 2022, Timnit Gebru was fired, and then Margaret Mitchell was fired in this really awful, shady way, which really had a chilling effect on everyone. Even though the team was amazing, it was also really hard for us to get recognized for our work both inside the company and sometimes externally. Even when the Ethical AI team had really huge impacts, it was often sidelined. Timnit and Margaret had been fighting tirelessly for our team's work to get recognized and integrated into the company. It became harder to see a career for myself there, especially as a non-researcher trying to advocate for this kind of ethics work. When Timnit reached out a year later that she was starting DAIR I immediately said, "Absolutely!"
Job Titles:
- Researcher, Writer, and Architect of Creative
Hannah Scott is a researcher, writer, and architect of creative collaborations. She is currently thinking about how our experiences of ourselves are changing, specifically as a result of technology. These questions mostly assume the form of research, writing, and sound-based artwork.
Hannah Scott: The C/Change project is all about creating space through digital means - space for people to share ideas they may not be able to speak about freely in their geopolitical contexts, space for people to connect and collaborate with others they may never encounter in their physical location, space for people to work together to create better futures for both our planet and our digital landscapes.
Within that context, I'm thinking about augmented reality and its ability to transcend this semi-porous border between the physical and digital and create this in-between space. What are the unique experiences this medium offers, both for you as an artist and for audiences?
Nancy Baker Cahill: My relationship to the medium initially grew out of necessity. I had been creating a lot of artwork in VR, and quickly learned how high the barrier to entry was. That's just never been my goal - I wasn't trying to create some sort of scarcity. I was working with a development team at the time, and I told them I was concerned that I had no means of exhibiting this work. This was back in 2016. They said, "Well, have you ever considered AR?" That turned out to be a seminal turning point for my practice. The team helped me develop the 4th Wall App, which I originally created in an effort to challenge what public art was and could be. On the one hand, I wanted to share my work, but I also wanted to invite audiences to participate in the work and to decide whatever context or content they wanted to create with these assets that I had made. In other words, I wanted to work collaboratively with an unknown and unseen audience. The results of those anonymous collaborations were breathtaking. They were just wildly imaginative in every possible arena, and that was extremely exciting to me. But it wasn't until Tanya Aguiñiga was messing around with the app down at the US-Mexico border, where she does all kinds of incredible activist and performance work, that I grokked the poetics of the medium. Tanya put one of my AR drawings in the United States and then pulled it through the border wall. That was a game changing moment. Right after that happened, I went back to my team, and I said, this miraculous thing happened! How can we open up this conversation to include other artists? And they said, "Well, we could think about geolocation." That was the beginning of the Coordinates platform, which is part of the app. Tanya and my friend Debra Scacco, who is also an amazing artist, were the first to sign up for this experiment to try to take works outside of the white cube site it in locations where it would have added resonance and value. So that launched one of the greatest odysseys I've had as an artist, and the project now spans the globe.
Jenny Odell looks at birds along her street and at parking lots on the internet. She is a new media artist and a writer whose work involves practices of close observation. "I didn't take the photographs of the parking lots, I didn't make the parking lots, but I found them and I put them in some kind of configuration that might jolt someone out of their familiarity with it." Odell's work reframes the infrastructure of the Internet and tries to draw attention to place. In 2018 she wrote How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. In 2015 she created the one-person organization, The Bureau of Suspended Objects, a media archeology of junk at the San Francisco Dump. Her forthcoming book, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock will be released in March 2023.
In episode 5 of the Signals podcast, Elia Vargas talks with Jenny Odell about her NY Times bestselling book, a childish (in a good way) excitement of mining the internet, and the importance of place and embodiment in contemporary digital culture. Like Odell's practice, the conversation is playful, broad, and tackles critical questions of digital attention, radical refusal, and being grounded in the world.