Introduction
Video in English
Format: mp4Length: 00:02:01
First published on: https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/xiaowei-wang/
Rights: © ICI Berlin
Part of the Lecture, Screening
Rendering Intelligence: Biomedical Datasets and the Impossible Image /
The impossible image describes the botanical illustrations crucial to building the British Empire, and the ways botanical drawings emerged as a moral model. In this talk, Wang will draw the connections between the impossible image of botanical illustrations and the traces of the impossible image in current understandings of generative AI. In this unpacking, Wang will look at these traces and their relation to biocentric ways of thinking, as well as at constructions and models of humanness and the body.
Xiaowei R. Wang is an artist, writer, organizer, and coder. They are the author of the book Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside, a 2023 National Book Foundation Science and Literature Award winner. Their writing has appeared in TANK, transmediale, The Nation, and more. Currently, they are one of the stewards of Logic School, an organizing community for tech workers, as well as a Research Fellow at the Center on Race and Digital Justice and a Senior Civic Media Fellow at USC Annenberg. They are working on their second book on the design of tech for care, as well as a new body of work, Witch Fever, that is a speculative botany co-created with an AI.