Building a Feminist Dataset

17/09/2018 – 11am to 4pm

Building a Feminist Dataset
Caroline Sinders

This workshop explores how data collection can be used as an artistic practice and a collaborative, community practice. The workshop involves a lecture on machine learning, data, and design thinking, but ultimately is collaborative and a facilitated process towards building a feminist data set from the ground up. The workshop explores the potential of data to disrupt larger systems by generating new forms of agency and asks: Can data collection itself function as an artwork? Can it act as a form of protest? The creation of this feminist data set will act as a means to combat bias and introduce the possibility of data collection as a feminist practice, aiming to produce a slice of data to intervene in larger civic and private networks.

Participants will be invited to bring digital content such as images, gifs, videos, sound, music and texts, which they feel is feminist in nature, to feed into the data set, which teaches an AI system to recognise such data (examples: The Feminine Mystique, Beyonce’s Lemonade, “I Want a Dyke for President”, the Cyborg Feminist Manifesto, etc.). This process raises questions concerning qualitative data collection and requires the group to reflect on categories supposed to capture feminism.

Rua Red Gallery
Belgard Square
Tallaght
Dublin
D24 KV8N
info@ruared.ie