Panel Discussion
Living With Machines: A Critical Approach to Technology in Art
This series of talks brings together artists Manuel Beltran, Chinar Shah, Mithu Sen, and Anisha Baid, each exploring technology from a distinct vantage point. Ranging from bio-hacking to myth-making to acts of appropriation, their practices reflect diverse ways of living in — and thinking against — a hyper-technological world. The conversation will close with a discussion on the shifting landscape of art and tech today: What does it mean to make art about technology, and what does it take to make art through it?
Computer as Woman – Anisha Baid
This presentation will trace a body of work across performance, sculpture, and video that explores the feminized labor histories embedded in the computer interface. These works look at the computer as not simply a tool, but a surface of work haunted by histories of work, capital and habit. Through these works, I approach technology not as an inevitable outcome, but as a culturally and politically contingent reality—shaped by specific histories, decisions, and omissions – and one that, in turn, continues to shape us and mold us – how we sit, how we talk, and how we work.
Screenshots – Chinar Shah
In this talk, I reflect on my practice as a screenshot photographer through the intertwined histories of documentary photography and family albums. As I navigate my digital life by making images, I am drawn to visual practices that are on the peripheries of networked culture—images created to circulate as information but exceed their intended meaning. By situating screenshot photography within the documentary impulse, I explore how such images complicate established understandings of photographic indexicality, and how they contribute to evolving forms of image-making within the online space.
Hammers in the Server Room – Manuel Beltran
In this talk I will offer some thoughts about the Luddite movement to reflect upon how the current contestations we face in AI and Big Tech aren’t completely new, and how they connect with similar conditions that the Luddites were challenging during the Industrial Revolution. With this in mind, and through the lens of the project Institute of Human Obsolescence (IoHO), I will present questions about the role of AI in automation, and the exploitation of data as a form of invisible labour. The IoHO stages a series of installations and interventions that propose a different framework through which to reorganise our relationship with contemporary technologies.”
Digital Un-native – Mithu Sen
I navigate the digital world with deliberate discomfort—refusing fluency, embracing glitches, and reclaiming virtual space as a site of resistance, care, and feminist untranslatability.
Bookings
Bookings are closed for this event.
Final Upgrade, Anisha Baid, multimedia installation, 2023
