MY (recent) PRIDE AND JOYS

- developed and led a workshop on Crafting Protopian Toolkits and made a little workbook for it
- i teach high school students — and they told my supervisor I’m cool af

FROM
(geographically)

West Coast

FROM
(in training/education)

sociology, education, media arts

FROM
(politically)

FBA, multicultural family, lived abroad, afronowism

POLITICAL MOVEMENTS | CONCERNS | GOALS

- getting more people engaged in direct action and community preparedness
- shaping influence of tech in our daily lives (combatting surveillance)
- anti-blackness globally

SKILLS THAT PAY THE BILLS

- zine making
- building or assembling a physical object (fabrication)
- any type of writing

strawberry soda

whiskey

hot peppers

aidkaye@proton.me

Week 1 Reflections {will format later}

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/audre-lorde-the-master-s-tools-will-never-dismantle-the-master-s-house


"What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow parameters of change are possible and allowable."


"Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of difference strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters."


"For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change."

Much of my personal practice is shaped by a recognition that the perspectives of the historically oppressed are one of the most untapped tools for liberation. As technology that has been developed for patriarichal, colonial, and extractive ends becomes more embedded in our lives it reinforces and codifies that way of living, increases it seamlessness as the way the world works rather than the way the world has been designed. It is my desire to challenge the mostly male, white, and Asian influence over the look and experience of emerging technology. I have started this exploration by practicing and examining Black, Indigenous and Queer cultural technologies and then creating experiences that imbed the lessons I've learned from them into new experiences, making tangible a different way of doing/being. The hope is to broaden what is imaginable, possible, and desirable in the technology we live with; to give people new tools both physical and psychological. I thin the master's tools can help us in our fight against oppression as a tool is a tool, but I do not believe those tools alone will free us. We need to return to old tools and create new ones.

Week 2 Reflections {to be formatted later}

Going through the different resources I wanted to note down the different tools and some impacts

Modes of engagement:
- Datasets and Archives
- Libraries
- Manuals
- Maps
- Event Calendars
- Directories and information logs that link to other resources
- Data Visualizations/Data Models
- Memorials

Impacts
- directional tools
- opportunities to connect locally
- historical/cultural awareness and documentation
- clarity/understanding of important systems
- challenges systemic norms and presents alternative narratives
- provides access to harder to access or locate tools and resources
- demonstrate the impact/extent of an issue
- pulling back the veil on some of the invasive/seemingly seamless systems that impact us

Week 3 Reflections

Looking through these examples I find myself evaluating them through the lens of art project and tool. In my own journey I have oscillated between wanting to be a researcher, an artist, an inventor/disruptor, and a community organizer/educator. For me these roles have all been connected to the same themes but are different in their goals and impacts. While I love and appreciate the arts I feel I've been in spaces that over inflate the impact of the artist and that is what is informing my current take.

In tool vs. art project impact is the defining quality. The goal of a lot of art about social issues/systemic forces is to point to something, something important that should be acknowledged, saying "look here, look here." Often this art does little else and largely engages an audience that already had adjacent interests. I think this is important work but this can't be the only work and I think artists and appreciators of art in my circles need to be reminded of this.

While I still consider my practice an art practice I am trying to push everything I do into the tool category by making it teachable and usable by others. Rather than it just being a thing I made that people can play with or observe I am trying to use my work as a vehicle to teach new skills and get people to engage in new practices.

Below are some additional notes about the examples and their art project vs tool alignment.

Art project or tool:
- Bail Bloc (tool)
- Coppleganger (art project)
- Electronic Disturbance Theater
- Transborder Immigrant Tool
- Synthetic Messenger (art project)
- Cold Call (art project)
- AI Boosters
- Anti-AI 'Poison'
- Adnauseum (tool)
- Tracmenot
- Nightshade
- Slow LLM (tool/art project)

Bail Bloc: appreciate the "leftist automation" tactics of making something that aims for minimal effort, maximum reward in addition to being decentralized, that it directly helped vulnerable populations, and leveraged a topic of interest to get a conversation about bail and the prison industrial complex going in a wider audience

Kpop Stans Vs Dallas Police: is interesting because of its organic nature or utilization of existing social bond over something totally unrelated. Makes me think about what could be accomplished if we strayed from social scripts and talked about new things in our existing circles

Synthetic Messenger: (example that first brought to mind the tool vs art project distinction) points to a real system we should aim to dismantle/change but the direct impact and the reach as an awareness campaign seem too small making it feel like it's mostly for people who already like to talk about this topic. Cold Call seems even less impactful beyond pointing to an issue because of the way with it's formula counts the CEO's time as the most influential. I feel like CEOs are often lauded as overpaid for what they contribute implying that for most of the seconds of the day the machine beneath them runs efficiently without their time or focus.

Synthetic Messenger and AdNauseum interact with the same mechanism (data collection through ad clicks) but with AdNauseum's disruption operating on an individual level that can be scaled the more people use it, it feels more like a tool than Synthetic Messenger feels like an art project.

Week 1 Reflections {will format later}

https://laboriacuboniks.net/manifesto/xenofeminism-a-politics-for-alienation/

Need them to say more about being anti naturalist

"Why is there so little explicit, organized effort to repurpose technologies for progressive gender political ends? XF seeks to strategically deploy existing technologies to re-engineer the world. Serious risks are built into these tools; they are prone to imbalance, abuse, and exploitation of the weak. Rather than pretending to risk nothing, XF advocates the necessary assembly of techno-political interfaces responsive to these risks. Technology isn’t inherently progressive. Its uses are fused with culture in a positive feedback loop that makes linear sequencing, prediction, and absolute caution impossible. Technoscientific innovation must be linked to a collective theoretical and political thinking in which women, queers, and the gender non-conforming play an unparalleled role." +1 this

"Xenofeminism is about more than digital self-defence and freedom from patriarchal networks. We want to cultivate the exercise of positive freedom–freedom-to rather than simply freedom-from–and urge feminists to equip themselves with the skills to redeploy existing technologies and invent novel cognitive and material tools in the service of common ends."

"XF rejects illusion and melancholy as political inhibitors."

"Digital technologies are not separable from the material realities that underwrite them; they are connected so that each can be used to alter the other towards different ends. Rather than arguing for the primacy of the virtual over the material, or the material over the virtual, xenofeminism grasps points of power and powerlessness in both, to unfold this knowledge as effective interventions in our jointly composed reality."

Week 1 Reflections {will format later}

https://monoskop.org/images/d/df/Critical_Art_Ensemble_Electronic_Civil_Disobedience_and_Other_Unpopular_Ideas.pdf

I really enjoy Mimi Onuoha's The Library of Missing Datasets for the way it calls attention to a number of layered issues
1- what information is missing, excluded, and hidden -- which then begs the question: what is the impact of this lack of data
2- the impact of collecting data
3- the assumption that data collection is normal or should be occurring
4- the varying impact of being documented vs not through data
5- who has control over data, it's creation and disappearance, and value
6- methodology for data collection and its current limits

I also appreciate this work because it doesn't leave off after posing these questions but then attempts to consider different possible responses to this absence

Wk 2 Q1:

What information/resources/content do you think your communities need or want or could use?
- Consider your own interests, along with those of the class.
- Who would the audience be and how would we reach them?

Wk 2 Q2:

What form could the community resource take?
- How can we make it more than “just a pamphlet” or “just a website”? What is it?

Ai D. Kaye A1:

I feel a bit stuck in these realms without having a better sense of who I am working with. I think that has to come before I can really speak to what topic to address.

Wk 2 Q3:

Again: how can we ensure that it reaches people?
- Include: How can we make it appealing to people? Perhaps we can make it participatory in some way or something people want to have

Ai D. Kaye A2:

Geo locatable graffiti or wheat paste, hybrid physical and digital object (button pin/accessory)

Wk 2 Q4:

What do you personally want to contribute I want to do something that augments our built environment or physical space, something you could touch or be in physical proximity to

Ai D. Kaye A4:

I want to do something that augments our built environment or physical space, something you could touch or be in physical proximity to

Ai D. Kaye A3:
Perhaps we can make it participatory in some way or something people want to have

Week 3 Reflections

AdNauseam is a tool of obfuscation. Obfuscation tactics are a sort of guerrilla
warfare approach to the lack of privacy protections. Since it’s not possible to hide
from Google’s surveillance, these tactics introduce inaccurate or excessive
information to confuse and ultimately sabotage it.