Art Event: The Ambiguity of Sorting

The Ambiguity of Sorting
How do technologies of separation bring us together?

Digital systems are based on acts of transformation from continuity and unity into discreteness and separation. These acts of transformation have been popularized in the multiple ways in which humans engage with AI systems and other forms of digital technologies. Everything we do is transformed, one could say, automatically into data. It is transformed into discrete units that can be computed. Digital technologies have become more than tools for research; people produce knowledge with them, engage emotionally through and with these systems, generating new forms and spaces of intimacy. At the same time, these technologies carry a history of creating disconnections, failing to account for different ways of engaging with the world. They are the result of a certain imaginary of the human and intelligence, one that leaves aside many other existing ways to be in the world. What kind of communities are enabled by technologies? What kind of technologies are successful in bringing communities together? Can we imagine a history of technology that is based on plural ways of understanding intelligence and the human? How can we design technologies that bring people together? How can we imagine technologies that enable communities?

The Ambiguity of Sorting is a pop-up exhibition and a panel discussion that takes place during the 8th edition of the Conference of the Society for the History and Philosophy of Computing. The event brings together installation, performance, and conversations to discuss how the history of intelligent systems embodied ideas of intelligence, the human, and how we live together. With the panel, we invite to think of a different history of computing, one where those that were not thought to be fitting within their categories were creating their own technologies all along.

With contribution by: Sasha Bergstrom-Katz, Ren Loren Britton, and Verena Friedrich

Organization and moderation: Ana Maria Guzmán Olmos

Find out more about the artists and their artworks on this website.

Header photo: Sasha Bergstrom-Katz, On the Subject of Tests: Opening Boxes, 2022. Video.