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Founded in 2014, IIF grew out of Concordia University\u2019s 2006 partnership with Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace, an \u201cAboriginally determined research-creation network\u201d dedicated to establishing and fostering Indigenous visibility in online environments, as virtual territories advance in importance toward that of the real. In its five years, IIF has cultivated a research network of Aboriginal artists, technologists, theorists, and activists focused on interrogating the assumed drivers of technological change as a means to disrupt neo-colonial narratives of progress.
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IIF at MUTEK_IMG<\/strong> This past August, IIF co-founder Professor Jason Edward Lewis and Lakota performance artist Suzanne Kite, a PhD candidate at Concordia currently assisting research at the Initiative, presented one of three keynotes at Forum IMG, a symposium dedicated to the exploration of the practical and theoretical impacts of creative digital technology presented at the annual MUTEK Montreal electronic arts festival. Each year, the thematically-curated forum addresses a critical industry issue through panels, workshops, and exhibitions, reimagining the festival concept from an entertainment-only presentation, to a conference about education. This year\u2019s topic, Imagining Our Digital Futures, strongly focus on the urgent need to address rapid technological development without any accountability. This particular theme hits hard in Montreal, ever since the city became a leading global hub for the AI and machine learning industry<\/a>, with much of the funding allocated for research. Among panels covering everything from the dark future of data surveillance, to the complexities of defining authorship in the age of algorithmic art, the IIF keynote stood out as the most imaginative, maybe even hopeful, presentation describing the potential digital future. \u201cWe\u2019d like to begin by acknowledging that this event is taking place on unceded Indigenous lands…\u201d So began Kite and Lewis\u2019 keynote, Making Kin with the Machines<\/em>. The Indigenous land acknowledgement has emerged as a well-intentioned, but oft-trite, kickoff custom for Canada\u2019s cultural events, a gesture of atonement for past genocides that ignores the continuing systemic violence experienced globally by First Nations people<\/a>. Those words resonate as they offer a way to discuss possible futures, rather than rhetorically bandaging history. The keynote continues a discussion that Kite and Lewis introduced in the essay of the same name<\/a> written alongside Hawaiian indegenous historian Noelani Arista and Plains Cree performance artist Archer Pechawis, which was one of the winners of the \u201cResisting Reduction\u201d essay competition, and was later published by MIT\u2019s Journal of Design and Science. The essay challenges the current anthropocentric models being used define the development of advanced computational systems, and instead propose a \u201ckinship\u201d model that dismantles any notion that humans matter more than the environments with which they create. Making Kin with the Machines <\/em>combined ideas from three different North American and Pacific Indigenous traditions, as represented by the authors, each challenging the Enlightenment’s nature-culture divide in which the human holds itself separate, and above the organic in order to observe the natural world from a scientifically-appropriate distance(1<\/em>)<\/a><\/sup>. The distinction is informed by a reason-driven framework that requires an \u2018othering\u2019 which makes holistic cosmologies problematic to the Western philosophical movement. Thus, indigenous thought became a problem to be solved in the name of humanist progress, with the enlightened expansionist bestowing the \u201cgift\u201d of rational thought, by way of \u201ccivilizing the savage.\u201d(2<\/em>)<\/a><\/sup> <\/strong> It is precisely this assumption, which continues to inform current social models and modes of production that IIF calls into question, by illustrating the fundamental disconnect between those developing algorithmic technologies and those\u2014human and non-human alike\u2014who are forced to endure the consequences of such technologies without having any say in their development. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A Good Way Protocol<\/strong> \u201cThe only thing that\u2019s interesting to me about the Western engagement with AI and machine learning is that we had to write a new language in order to communicate with rocks,\u201d said Kite. She is speaking of coding languages, zeroing in on the fact that inherent to computational development is the creation of ways to speak, and listen, to an object. Within the Lakota ontology in which Kite was raised, there is no division between the \u201cactive\u201d subject and the \u201clatent\u201d object. There is an ecological value of the whole, where human and nonhuman histories are interwoven into a pattern of action and consequence. The latter is a being that which holds a cosmo-terrestrial record far beyond any historical document possibly developed by the former. This cosmology, the acknowledgment of the inanimate object as an intelligent part of the tellurian community, Kate suggests can help structure our evolving relationship with AI twofold. If intelligence\u2014or non-human interiority<\/a>\u2014is recognized in every segment of AI development, it can help technologists create an ethical framework toward building AI all the way down to the raw materials sourced for its physical components, as well as eliminate defining any part of its development as an \u201cartificial\u201d entity. \u201cOur [Lakota] elders gave us clear values. There are seven sacred rites, seven sacred virtues, that we are committed to perform over the course of our lives that guide us toward how to do something in a \u2018good way,\u2019\u201d Kite explains. This \u2018good way\u2019 protocol toward the development of AI is the foundation of Kite\u2019s contribution to Making Kin with the Machine, <\/em>as well as that of her own art-based research.<\/em> \u201cThe agency of stones connects directly to the question of AI, as AI is formed from not only code, but from materials of the earth,\u201d Kite writes, \u201cto remove the concept of AI from its materiality is to sever this connection.\u201d By ignoring non-human interiority, we continue the exploitation-based production protocol that has been the driving engine behind Western colonial capitalist ontology, and it is marked by blood every step of the way. When the metal coltan, for instance, is reduced from \u201cbeing\u201d to \u201cresource\u201d, we can ignore the civil wars and gross human rights violations caused by mining to meet demand; we can package this relationship neatly with the media-ready term \u201cconflict minerals\u201d and more easily dehumanize as \u201ccollateral damage\u201d those killed in these conflicts or in the process of collecting said minerals(3<\/em>)<\/a><\/sup>. This will continue to manifest in the computational biosphere all the way up and through AI development unless it\u2019s interrupted by protocols that acknowledge the world as an interconnected whole. \u201cIf you build AI in a completely good way, then you don\u2019t have to worry that the cyborg monster is going to come murder everyone because it\u2019s not built from the ground up within a hellish world-ending ontology.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n White Supremacy: It\u2019s Not Just for People Anymore!<\/strong> Lewis described just how this inherent nature-culture divide trickles into the social implications of AI as it becomes more prevalent in both public and private sectors of society. \u201cTrying to make this really clear distinction between what is real and what is artificial, holding up the human as separate and above the rest of creation by terming it artificial, allows us to distance ourselves from [AI],\u201d Lewis says, \u201cwhen we see it as a tool, we don\u2019t have to think about it as a product of human effort.\u201d This, he argues, allows both those developing and implementing intelligent technologies to hand off responsibility to the machine without questions of human accountability. It is furthered by the acceptance of the machine learning \u201cblack box,\u201d in which engineers provide no transparency about how the models they design produce results upon which ML-informed decision-making ultimately relies(4<\/em>)<\/a><\/sup>. Surprising the audience Lewis asks, \u201cwhat sort of engineering practice do we have where we can build this thing over here that people\u2019s lives depend on, but don\u2019t really understand how it works?\u201d(5<\/em>)<\/a><\/sup> IIF sees an opportunity to interrupt presumed methods of development by amplifying the whole spectrum of global Indigenous voices in the techno-scientific conversation. \u201cAs Indigenous people, as a brown person myself, we\u2019ve been at the pointy end of technology where technologies have been used against us. Part of the way they\u2019ve been able to be used against us to get status is by devaluing us as human beings,\u201d Lewis says. \u201cWhat kind of AI entities do I want in my life that are going to help me and my communities thrive, as opposed to creating yet another tool that will be used to suppress us, to constrain us, and to once again claim that we are not full members of the human?\u201d This concern\u2014that technological development within a Western ideology that promotes conquest through violence both brute and epistemic will only breed more of the same\u2014affects humanity as a whole, not just those currently on the \u201cpointy end.\u201d While it might be the oppressed always on the frontlines pushing against oppressive technologies, technology always breaches beyond to be established as a tool for the subjugation of the masses as a whole. \u201cThe historically-oppressed know what\u2019s coming only because it happens to them first and worst,\u201d Kite observes, \u201cbut your average cis white man will be oppressed by the same tools. It seeps into everything. It\u2019s poison.\u201d Being as deep in the trenches as we already are, how can we prevent the furthering of systemic oppression so efficiently promoted by the deployment of algorithmic reductionism removed from human accountability. Recently, evidence of this dilemma clearer than ever, validating the prescient fears of the oppressed. On September 19th, Kate Crawford, AI Now Institute Founder and Director, and artist-activist Trevor Paglen published Excavating AI<\/em>, a damning research paper illustrating the alarming fallibility of datasets used to train object and facial recognition AI systems(6<\/em>)<\/a><\/sup>. ImageNet, one of the most widely used databases for recognition training, categorized persons under clearly-biased labels such as \u201crapist,\u201d \u201ccall girl,\u201d \u201cyellow person,\u201d and \u201chermaphrodite\u201d. (ImageNet purged over 600,000 photos of people after the paper was published). IBM\u2019s Diversity in Faces training sets used facial symmetry and craniometry methods to classify subjects by race, a practice reminiscent of the pseudoscientific methods used to justify biological determinism that led to the field of eugenics. Adam Harvey and Jules LaPlace called out Duke University for a photo repository illicitly populated by surveillance footage of its students\u2014the majority demographic of which are cis white men(7<\/em>)<\/a><\/sup>. Despite responses toward accountability, any damage caused by the biases of these sets is now deeply entrenched in the algorithms they trained; there is simply no way to post-facto isolate and remove malignant clusters from a neural network. A lack of protocol reverberates beyond human imagination. Listening to the Machine<\/strong> This moment is particularly ripe for disruption because it\u2019s the first time that we are creating something that talks back to us in a way that simulates parts of the human emotional spectrum. \u201c[AI] can see patterns and connections that we can\u2019t see and make them visible to us,\u201d Lewis says, \u201cAnd it gives us a place to think through what \u2018humanness\u2019 is\u2014not because AI is on its way to becoming human, but because it creates an interesting mirror to think through how we organize ourselves as humans.\u201d From the outset, AI requires a deep interconnectedness between human and non-human entities, creating Indigenous ontologies that celebrate this interconnectedness especially adept at assessing what we see in that mirror and how we engage with these newly-visible patterns toward a more ethical communal future. Machine learning has put the human in an object-receptive position that goes beyond observation, indicating a potential gateway to introducing holistic ontologies into Western scientific and technological practices. \u201cIt feels really magical when your machine learning model does something you didn\u2019t expect, but it\u2019s just the first step,\u201d Kite says. \u201cIt\u2019s almost forcing objects to be listened to on your terms.\u201d Kite regularly explores the practice of listening\u2014or her \u201cdesperation to hear something,\u201d as she calls it\u2014in her own art, exemplifying a move to a good-way protocol throughout her process. Kite\u2019s recent interactive sculptures, which join traditional Lakota symbology and practice with physical computation and machine learning, physicalize listening by producing sound or visual output based on the circular communication between audience\/interactor and the material components of the piece. Thus, Kite illustrates the result of reciprocity between the human and non-human, informed by an ontology in which both hold equal value as sacred, by creating something together. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Lewis is coming at the research from a different angle by facilitating conversations about potential uses and locally-informed development of AI in response to his hope to create technologies that help communities on his native Hawaiian islands thrive. For instance, could the revitalization of Indigenous fishponds, which were all but destroyed by colonial settlers, be assisted by machine learning models trained on the knowledge of elder fishmasters? Lewis says that some locals stewarding fishponds are currently trying to develop technology that can automate calculating the fish population in order to alleviate the fishmaster workload. \u201cCounting the fish\u2026 seems like a really simple issue, right? But there are technical issues that get in the way of detection, like murky water and weird light refraction,\u201d Lewis says. Beyond that, there are intuitive aspects of pond stewardship that are difficult to digitize, such as the individual age or school affiliation of a fish, which masters can determine based on their knowledge of each specific fishpond ecosystem as a whole. In attempting to address these gaps in cultural knowledge, Lewis highlights one of AI\u2019s major flaws: what parts of humanity are being left out of the machine learning training base for the sake of flattened datafication? The answer might be so overwhelming, that the industry in its current state has chosen to ignore it for the sake of rapid growth. \u201cHow do you instantiate generational communication computationally?\u201d Lewis asks. \u201cThere are things in caring for a territory, like observing migratory patterns or large scale change that is difficult to see from our timeframe, that these systems can be really helpful for. But for me, the question is how to develop them in a way that they are part of the community, in a way that keeps the data local to the people that you want to use it.\u201d <\/a>1. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social : An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory<\/em>, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2005.<\/p>\n <\/a>2. Horsman, Reginald, and Reginald HORSMAN. Race and Manifest Destiny : The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism<\/em>, Harvard University Press, 1986.<\/p>\n <\/a>3. Nathan, Dev, and Sandip Sarkar. \u201cBlood on Your Mobile?\u201d Economic and Political Weekly<\/em>, vol. 45, no. 43, 2010, pp. 22\u201324.<\/p>\n <\/a>4. Finn, Ed. \u201cAlgorithm of the Enlightenment.\u201d Issues in Science and Technology<\/em>, vol. 33, no. 3, 2017, pp. 21\u201325.<\/p>\n <\/a>5. Mbadiwe, Tafari. \u201cAlgorithmic Injustice.\u201d The New Atlantis<\/em>, no. 54, 2018, pp. 3\u201328.<\/p>\n <\/a>6. Crawford, Kate & Paglen, Trevor. “Excavating AI.”<\/a><\/p>\n <\/a>7. Harvey, Adam, & LaPlace, Jules. “Megapixels Project.”<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Initiative for Indigenous Futures is working to create infrastructure and culture for Indigenous peoples to imagine their own futures. Gabriella Garcia catches up with them in Montreal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-issue-6"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/itp.nyu.edu\/adjacent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2720"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/itp.nyu.edu\/adjacent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/itp.nyu.edu\/adjacent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itp.nyu.edu\/adjacent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itp.nyu.edu\/adjacent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2720"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/itp.nyu.edu\/adjacent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2720\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2746,"href":"https:\/\/itp.nyu.edu\/adjacent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2720\/revisions\/2746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/itp.nyu.edu\/adjacent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itp.nyu.edu\/adjacent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itp.nyu.edu\/adjacent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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