Relational Technologies, Technological Relations – An interdisciplinary assembly on existential challenges of AI and biometrics
Project Rooms
Curator: Jacek Smolicki and the Uppsala Hub for Digital Existence, in collaboration with Färgfabriken
Artists and contributors: Joanna Zylinska, Linda Hilfling Ritasdatter, Kristoffer Gansing, Maria Hellström Reimer, Tania Ruiz, Mary Maggic, Mahmoud Keshavarz, Pedro Oliveira, Max Björverud, and Jacek Smolicki.
Technology has always been with us and within us. It has shaped our relationships with each other and with the world around us since humanity’s beginning. However, the recent acceleration in the development of computing technologies, increasingly driven by automated algorithms and artificial intelligence, has reconfigured many of these relationships in unprecedented ways. Machine-based, AI-driven quantification and biometric measurement of human and non-human lives, behaviors, and practices are just some examples that prompt us to ask: In today’s techno-cultures, how do we relate to each other and our shared environments on personal, social, political, and even ontological and existential levels? How do technologies—and those who shape them from front to back—negotiate, mediate, and manipulate these relationships?
Relational Technologies, Technological Relations emerged from discussions held as part of a research project titled BioMe: Existential Challenges and Ethical Imperatives of Biometric AI in Everyday Lifeworlds, funded by WASP-HS led by Professor Amanda Lagerkvist at IM/Uppsala University. The project’s central aim has been to investigate the experiential range of encounters with these technologies, focusing on both their possibilities and their challenges and vulnerabilities, in order to examine the urgent ethical imperatives they pose for a networked humanity.
This event marks the conclusion of the BioMeproject by focusing on how artists, critical media practitioners, and other creative individuals and collectives engage both practically and conceptually with automation, surveillance, life-measuring technologies, and the biometrically orchestrated realities of everyday life. Through diverse perspectives on relationality, these works will interrogate the current hype around DNA analysis services, shed light on the opaque logic of Netflix content categorization algorithms, explore links between modern and historical anthropometric systems, question border-control technologies, critically engage with artificial voices, and reconnect with the biodiverse forms of intelligence.
Program and publications
The opening event will take place on Friday, February 7, 2025, at 5 p.m., with a keynote by Joanna Zylinska titled Bio-AI: Hybrid Ecologies, Buggy Ontologies, followed by a panel discussion with the invited artists.
Between february 8 and March 2, there will be several workshops, talks, and accompanying activities by Linda Hilfling Ritasdatter, Kristoffer Gansing, Mary Maggic, Brett Ascarelli, along with the members of the BioMe Project, including Amanda Lagerkvist, Matilda Tudor, Jenny Eriksson Lundström, Marie Rogg, Charles Ess and Jacek Smolicki. The program will be updated.
The is also a prelude to a book with a similar title to be published and launched later in 2025.
Image: Maria Hellström Reimer and Tania Ruiz, DNA at play: the Transparency and Opacity of Recreational Genealogy
Contact
Funding
The BioMe project and this concluding event are funded by WASP-HS, the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation, and the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation.