Honestly Confused, Creasy in the Memory: On Queer Archives, Artificial Intelligence and Dissociative Worldmaking – Presented by Lucas LaRochelle
About the talk:
What is the role of fiction and fabulation in the marginalized archive? What does artificial intelligence have to teach us about living with the incoherency of trauma? How can dissociation be harnessed as a worldmaking strategy?
This talk will explore these questions in relation to the genesis of QT.bot – an artificial intelligence trained on the textual and visual data of the community-generated counter mapping platform Queering The Map – that generates speculative queer and trans narratives and the environments in which they occur. In collaboration with the voices of their human community, QT.bot fabulates on the absences of the archive, orienting us away from what is, and towards what could be.
The talk will be followed by an interactive seminar in which we will collectively read a few excerpts from queer, trans and decolonial texts, and discuss how situated knowledge systems might enable us to rethink how machine learning technologies are designed and implemented.
This talk is presented in collaboration with University of Toronto’s:
- Faculty of Information’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Unit
- Centre for Culture and Technology
- Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies
About the speaker:
Lucas LaRochelle (they/them) is a designer and researcher whose work is concerned with queer and trans digital cultures, community-based archiving, and co-creative media. They are the founder of Queering The Map, a community generated counter-mapping project for digitally archiving LGBTQ2IA+ experience in relation to physical space.
They have presented research at Stanford University, University of Cambridge, The Bartlett School of Architecture, University of Puerto Rico Rio Piedras School of Architecture, amongst other academic institutions. Their work and writing has been published in Dreaming Beyond AI, Network Imaginaries, Futuress, MIT’s Immerse, Queer Sites in Global Contexts, Atlas Menor #1, QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK #3, Diagrams of Power, IWAKAN, ROM, Accent, Echelles, and Perfect Strangers, amongst other books and publications.
They have lectured, facilitated, and exhibited internationally, recently at:
- The Guggenheim Museum (USA)
- Mozilla Festival (UK)
- PHI Center (Canada)
- Gallery Tata (Japan)
- arc en rêve (France)
- School of Expansive Architecture (South Africa)
- Digital Writer’s Festival (Australia)
- MUTEK (Canada)
- Ars Electronica (Austria)
- LINZ FMR Festival (Austria)
- Somerset House (UK)
- Onomatopee Projects (Netherlands)
- fanfare (Netherlands)
- OTHERWISE Festival (Zurich)
- Ada X (Canada)
- Interaccess (Canada)
- SBC Gallery (Canada)
In 2019 they were the inaugural Curatorial Fellow at The Curatorial and Public Scholarship Lab. They have been in residence at Ada X, Social Service Club, MUTEK AI Art Lab and The Fine Arts Reading Room, and are the recipient of the 2021 CQAM/Turbulent Residency.
In 2016 they received a certificate in Co-Design from the Utrecht University of Applied Sciences, and a BFA in Design and Computation Arts from Concordia University in 2020.
Details:
When: Monday, March 27 at 6:00PM
Where: The Centre for Culture and Technology – University of Toronto 39A Queen’s Park Crescent East Toronto, ON M5S 2C3
Register here.
