Scholar and Educator Dr. Ramon Amaro:

Wednesday, November 20

12pm

1156 Chapel Street, Graphic Design Atrium (Room 104)

Hosted in conjunction with the public lectures organized by the Yale School of Art in tandem with its 150th anniversary and its status as a co-educational professional school of art, scholar and educator Dr. Ramon Amaro will deliver a public lecture on the afternoon of November 20th on his recent research regarding machine learning as it relates to systems of value and racialized exclusion. In On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Gilbert Simondon argues that alienation in our contemporary techno-culture is caused by an imbalance in our perception and recognition of certain object as having more value than others, which is pronounced by a desire for power in a partial and biased culture. Simondon argues that this condition, or what he describes as an “inadequate rapport” between humans and technology, can be surpassed by building an authentic “awareness” of the existence of technical objects. This dynamic, according to Simondon, is a problem of language, which serves the dual function of identification and exclusion. In this talk, Dr. Amaro argues that there are similarities between Simondon’s thoughts on human-techno alienation and Frantz Fanon’s treatise on the mastery of language, the “abandoned” racialized object, and the affordances of power. He ground these concepts in machine learning to consider what these provocations might mean in terms of racism and racialized exclusion in non-linear (and therefore, nonrepresentational) computational languages. Ultimately, Dr. Amaro questions how alternative “awarenesses” and systems of value might be achieved in the relation between machine-object-human.

Dr. Ramon Amaro is a Lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research and practice stem from his seminal work on Blackness, machine learning and the substances of race. His latest installation Darkness, as a First Act of Creation is currently exhibited at Het Nieuwe Instituut (Rotterdam, the Netherlands) as part of the Dutch contribution to the XXII Triennale di Milano. Dr. Amaro is an advisor for the 2019 Barbican London exhibition “AI: More than Human,” which is currently touring internationally. He is also a visiting scholar at the Royal Academy of Art (The Hague, the Netherlands) and the co-founder of the Centre for Queer Computing and Embedded Practice (UK and the Netherlands). Dr. Amaro completed his PhD in Philosophy at Goldsmiths, while holding a Master’s degree in Sociological Research from the University of Essex and a BSe in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His forthcoming book Anticipating Geometries: On Machine Learning, Sociogeny and the Substance of Race (Sternberg/MIT Press) will be published in Spring 2021.

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