Approaching diasporic cultural production as a technology of worldmaking, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian's free online lecture as part of the Fall 2021 Intra-Disciplinary Seminar series examines Armenian practitioners who encode futures beyond existing sociotechnical systems. Those systems include algolinguicism: automated processes that reinscribe the logics of coloniality by minoritizing language-users outside the Global North, obstructing their access to political participation on digital platforms. Placing SWANA cultural producers in the center of the frame, we will attend to artists who intervene in algolinguicism and other ways of knowing inflected by coloniality; artists who deploy technologies drawn from Indigenous pasts toward predictive models for forecasting liberatory outcomes.

Registration required.

Mashinka Firunts Hakopian is an artist, writer, and researcher born in Yerevan and residing in Glendale, CA. Her work is concentrated in media studies, visual culture, and West Asian diasporas. In 2021, she will serve as Mellon Professor in the Practice at Occidental College, where she is co-curating the exhibition “Encoding Futures: Critical Imaginaries of AI” at Oxy Arts. She is an Associate Director of Research at the Berggruen Institute, and an Associate Editor for Noema Magazine. Her book, Algorithmic Bias Training, or, Lectures for Intelligent Machines, is forthcoming in 2021 from X Artists’ Books.

The IDS public lecture series is part of the Robert Lehman Visiting Artist Program at The Cooper Union. We are grateful for major funding from the Robert Lehman Foundation. The IDS public lecture series is also made possible by generous support from the Open Society Foundations.