Some highlights from a lil chat I had with the good folks @liminalmag a while back. A mish mash of my erratic thoughts on AI and interface critique, racial formations as data formations, diversity awards as ethics washing, and what a caricature of a fat cat villain Louis B. Mayer was.
/5-questions/thao-phan
Coming up! Online talk as part of the University of Amsterdam Critical AI Seminar Series
📆 Wednesday May 20, 12-13:30 (CEST) // 20:00 - 21:30 (AEST)
Talk + screening of short doco "AI-in-the-street: Drone Observatory"
Testing-in-the-wild: innovation nationalism and the colonial dynamics of new technology testbeds
This presentation analyses the phenomenon of the AI testbed and practices of “testing-in-the-wild.” It combines historical and sociological approaches to understand how places like Australia have come to be treated as ideal test sites for new AI systems, using commercial drone delivery company Wing Aviation as a case study. It connects the figuration of Australia as a contemporary testbed with histories of the nation as a colonial experiment. I argue that this historical frame has been consistently deployed to justify the treatment of lands and peoples as experimental subjects across a range of domains: techniques of penal management in the nineteenth century, military weapons in the early twentieth century, and AI-driven systems like drone delivery in the twenty-first century. By connecting this history to the present moment, I show how Australia has been variously treated as a test site and Australians as test subjects based on changing imaginaries of the nation and its people, from proxies for whiteness and Empire in the colonial period, to multiculturalism and ethnic diversity in the contemporary era.
🔗 Registration link in bio
Save-the-date for AusSTS 2026!!
9 - 11 November
Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington
Aotearoa New Zealand
Theme: ANTIPODEAN INTERRUPTIONS 🙃🏔️💫
Full CFP coming Jan 2026!
A little essay from me on the Meta Ego4D dataset and what happens to art after it is eaten by the machinery of modern industries for absolute angel @litiaroko 's new work "Q1 Close" at @platform_canberracontemporary 💐
Open for the next few weeks! Get down there and see it live!
Q1 Close
Litia Roko
5 - 14 December
Platform by Canberra Contemporary
19 Furneaux st, Forrest ACT
ℍ𝕖𝕪 𝕄𝕖𝕥𝕒, 𝕎𝕙𝕠 𝔼𝕒𝕥𝕤 𝔸𝕣𝕥?
A bespectacled Chris Pratt stares pensively at a fresh banana duct taped to a wall. “Hey Meta, what’s this?” he asks. An automated voice replies: “This piece is called Comedian by Maurizo Cattelan valued at $6.2 million dollars.” He lets out a wide-eyed “woah!” before turning to contemplate another artwork in the gallery
This is the ad used by the tech multinational Meta to launch their newest venture into wearable tech: a pair of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered smart glasses. Made in collaboration with the company Ray-Ban, the glasses allow its users to “let AI see what you see, hear what you hear.” They come replete with built-in camera, microphone, speakers, augmented reality display, and access to a digital assistant that can quickly answer questions, pull up pictures and text, and in other ways help you to navigate the frictions of the real world.
Modelled by Pratt and a host of other celebrities, the glasses are shown live in action identifying objects, translating foreign phrases, and playing music. In one scene, Pratt looks on in horror as his Marvel co-star Chris Hemsworth is shown mistakenly eating the $6.2 million Cattelan banana. “I was hungry,” Hemsworth says naively. A third Kris, Kris Jenner, appears and in a wry voice asks “Hey Meta, who eats art?”
“Who eats art?” is the hinge for Litia Roko’s 2025 work Q1 Close. Such absurd scenes designed to skewer the conservative sensibility of art as elite cultural practice are what defines Roko’s own wry approach to the work of art in the age of mechanical (read: commercially platform mediated, capitalist-colonial-extractivist, opaque and algorithmically parsed) reproduction.
For Roko, the question of “who eats art?” begs the answer. Meta eats art, because Meta eats everything
Very honoured to receive the 2025 Max Crawford Medal from the Australian Academy of the Humanities last week 💐
Some words I shared at the awards ceremony in Sydney on this moment of polycrisis and the work we all must do to ensure the doors of the academy continue to stay open and the seats continue to be filled
This absolute mf is finally out!! New article from me on drone delivery, AI testbeds, and the long history of science and technology testing in the colony ✈️🌏👩💻
Testing-in-the-wild: Innovation nationalism and the colonial dynamics of new technology testbeds
ABSTRACT:
This article examines the phenomenon of the AI testbed and practices of testing-in-the-wild. It combines historical and sociological approaches to understand how the settler-colony of Australia has come to be treated as an ideal test site, using commercial drone delivery company Wing Aviation as a case study. It connects the figuration of Australia as contemporary testbed with histories of the nation as a colonial experiment. I argue that this historical frame has been consistently deployed to justify the treatment of lands and peoples as experimental subjects across a range of domains—from medical science, penal management, and military operations. In doing so, I show how Australia has been treated as a test site and Australians as test subjects based on changing imaginaries of the nation and its people—from proxies for whiteness and Empire in the colonial period, to multiculturalism and ethnic diversity in the contemporary era.
🔗 Online first in Dialogues on Digital Society. Link in bio
Singapore! I'm coming for you! 🦀 🥟 🍜 ✨
Public lecture
Artificial figures: gender-in-the-making in algorithmic culture
🗓️ Wednesday 19 November, 2 - 4pm
📍 Chinese Heritage Centre Auditorium m, Nanyang Technical University
Digital assistants with feminised voices, deceptive female robots, all-male research groups: gender forms a fundamental part of how we imagine the systems, fields, and figures we call ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI). While gender unquestionably shapes and structures scientific objects and knowledge, rarely do we consider how these phenomena have the capacity to shape gender in return. Indeed, gender is often reduced to a predetermined, preformed category; already made rather than something that is constituted through the practice of science or technology making itself.
This lecture explores how, in the making of AI systems and technologies, gender too is being made. It looks at key figures in AI’s cultural history — from foundational figures like Alan Turing and the Turing Test to cultural and commercial figures like Apple’s Siri and Amazon Echo. It demonstrates the role the humanities can play in understanding our past and reshaping our technological futures and outlines the critical contribution fields like feminist science and technology studies (feminist STS) can make to public debates on AI, algorithmic cultures, and beyond. The questions at the heart of this lecture seek to foreground issues of power, politics, and identity. They ask: how are more-than-human systems reconfiguring the terms of all-too-human categories like gender, race, class, ability, and more? How does gender influence how new technologies are made intelligible, mediating the expectations of a user, consumer, or audience? And finally, how might these encounters with AI reveal the artifice of gender as a system that is tied to the realm of the artificial as much as it is to nature and what we call ‘the natural’?
🔗 Registration link and details on bio
The 10 year anniversary issue of CATALYST: FEMINISM, THEORY, TECHNOSCIENCE is out now!
Feat.
1/ A killer compilation of interviews reflections, and commentaries from editors past and present
2/ A roundtable special section curated by @violetswt , Sonja Van Wichelen, and me on proposing a feminist toolkit for thinking populations from the antipodes
3/ A brilliant slate of original research articles + book reviews on predatory medicine, cellular narratives, disabled feminist (world)making, seeing like a Martian rover, and more!
Feeling v proud to be a part of this editorial team! Read the whole special issue at: /
✨ and then onto Berlin for the Matter's of Activity Annual Conference
Out of Hand: Active, Ambiguous, and Unsteady Matters
🗓️ Friday 19 September, 9am - 9pm
In the face of the current ecological predicament, substantial ›matters‹ are progressively getting ›out of hand‹ and require critical attention to their environmental, technological, and socio-material ambiguities. The annual conference of »Matters of Activity« attends to such complexities by intertwining material activities on multiple scales with questions of modeling, making, and playing on unsteady grounds. By convening a variety of interdisciplinary positions, we seek to inspire collaborative means to negotiate the legacies and futures of material-driven research.
We are delighted to welcome a distinguished group of speakers who will join us for the full day on 19 September at silent green Kulturquartier, as part of the ＿matter Festival 2025. We are especially honored that Karen Barad (UC Santa Cruz) has accepted our invitation to deliver the evening keynote.
Throughout the entire day, we will host four panels that will connect a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives, to be activated through our international panelists in dialogue with Cluster members.
Our international panel speakers are:
Philip Beesley (University of Waterloo),
Xan Chacko (Brown University),
Hélène Frichot (Melbourne School of Design),
Abelardo Gil-Fournier (BBVA Foundation Scholar),
Jussi Parikka (Aarhus University),
Thao Phan (Australian National University), and
Joachim Heberle (Freie Universität Berlin).
✨This week! In-person event at the Critical media Lab in Basel with some very good eggs 🥚
Regimes of Representability
🗓️ Tuesday 16 September, 2 - 4:15pm
@ranjodhd@dead_electronic_space_ltd@vincent_rqy@hgkbasel_criticalmedialab
What is seen, known, remembered in the age of bots & algorithms? How, what, and who does AI represent, and for whom?
We are asking these questions at a time when AI is increasingly used to generate personalized knowledge e.g., when replacing the lists of results of classic search engines with short summaries or extractive snapshots of the knowledge that is available (for you) on the internet (sic!). Scholars have discussed ad nauseam how both the data sets used for training machine learning algorithms and the processes through which these models “learn” result in skewed representations of reality — because they reproduce biases in data and iterate ways of knowing that render many aspects of reality invisible or unrepresentable.
Yet, none of these discussions and critiques have prevented those technologies framed as AI that have come to govern what we see, remember, and believe to know. In this CML in-conversation event, we will therefore discuss how AI has, despite all its known shortcomings, established credibility, reliability, and relatability — as e.g., a more ethical tool of representing violence, a more personal and intimate respondent, or a more balanced consensus-builder.
Thao Phan will present her and Fabian Offert’s research on nonhuman witnessing through AI.
Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal will discuss the rise of AI-branded computational photography in our smartphones, particularly as it aims to correct for the racism of previous regimes, especially that enabled by the disparate rendering of skin color in film photography.
In a follow-up conversation with CML contributors Qingyi Ren, Jisoo Lim and Johannes Bruder, Thao and Ranjodh will also discuss strategies of resistance against the new regimes of representability that AI technologies have introduced. How can we reclaim agency in the process of knowledge generation as bots & algorithms are—more or less subtly—changing the make-up of reality?
🔗 In bio
