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Aarti Sunder

India

Platforms: Around, In-between and Through, 2022-2023

Singapore Biennale 2022 Commission

Platforms: Around, In-between and Through explores how we communicate and interact with, around and through different platforms at various scales. The project is developed in three-parts and comprises various components, including a series of participatory workshops. The first workshop was conducted in September 2022 by Aarti Sunder. Participants from the September workshop will play the role of the conductor-performer by organising and conducting workshops in October 2022.

Janice Lum, Si Xuan and Priyageetha Dia will conduct a participatory workshop titled CHAINMAIL on 22 October to explore how knowledge is formed and communicated between human and non-human intelligence. Reflecting on meme culture and lived realities, CHAINMAIL invites participants to draw upon images and text that are transmitted digitally between everyday communication channels, artificial intelligence and open-source knowledge platforms.

from friendster to finsta, two workshops organised by Racy Lim, Ryan Loren Lee, Chand Chandramohan and Dylan Chan, on 29 and 30 October explore the parasocial dimension of current digital relationships. Together, participants and conductor-performers navigate the ever-changing cyber landscape of fiction, delusion and non-realities.

Through this, participants and contributors aim to broaden our collective understanding of platforms and the lens with which we may view them. The recordings and materials gathered from these workshops are presented as a mixed media installation within the exhibition space. The project will subsequently be assembled into a publication.

Between 30 January to 2 February, Sunder conducted a series of four online conversations with artists and scholars on ideas around platforms and platformization as an expanded and broad context of online-offline relationships that brings bodies (human and non-human), digital conduits, physical infrastructures and the marketplace together.

BIO

Aarti Sunder’s (b. 1986) research and practice lies at the crossroads of digital humanities and contemporary art. Sunder is interested in the fictions arising from investigating situated experiences and asking if these help us rethink the ways in which we understand technology and our relationship with it. Sunder focuses on contemporary labour practices, the fictional edges of protest, myth and digital-terrestrial play. She is interested in problematising the determined linearity of “progress” inscribed within the promise of the algorithm, technological prowess and a quantifiable future. By examining a globalised framework of precarious labour, non-human exhaustion and storytelling at the strategic intersection of power, knowledge and aesthetics as well as their intersections, she believes can help us tell better stories of fictions past, present and future.

INFORMATION

  • Platforms: Around, In-between and Through. 2022-2023. Workshop, book and conversation.

Aarti Sunder’s Programmes & Events

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Living and Undead Labour as part of Sweet Pea: Your Other Progeny
Living and Undead Labour as part of Sweet Pea: Your Other Progeny
  • Jeannine Tang
  • Aarti Sunder

This panel brings together artist Aarti Sunder with media theorist David Bering-Porter, for presentations of their recent work on digital images and platforms spanning MTurk and social media. This will be followed by a conversation on convergences between their art and writing – across the histories of digital ethnography, critical approaches to the moving image and regenerative media, questions of living and undead labour.

This programme is curated by Jeannine Tang as part of the Singapore Biennale 2022 named Natasha, organised by the Singapore Art Museum, with support from SAM Residencies. Co-presented with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, New York.

About the speakers
David Bering-Porter is Assistant Professor of Culture and Media at The New School in New York City. David has lectured, taught, and published on zombie movies and other forms of Black horror. Additional research interests bring together digital media theory, cultural studies, and emerging political economies and he teaches regularly on generative media and race and the digital. David is a founding member of the Digital Theory Lab at NYU and is an ongoing member of the steering committee for the Code as a Liberal Art program at The New School. His current book project is a study of Undead Labor and the ways that race, labor, and value come together in the mediated body of the zombie and his academic writing has appeared in journals such as Culture Machine, Critical Inquiry, Flow, MIRAJ, Post 45, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Aarti Sunder’s research and practice lies at the crossroads of digital humanities and contemporary art. She is interested in the fictions arising from investigating situated experiences and asking if these help us rethink the ways in which we understand technology and our relationship with it. Aarti focuses on contemporary labor practices, the fictional edges of protest, myth and digital-terrestrial play. She is interested in problematising the determined linearity of “progress” inscribed within the promise of the algorithm, technological prowess and a quantifiable future. By examining a globalized framework of precarious labor, non-human exhaustion and storytelling at the strategic intersection of power, knowledge and aesthetics, she believes can help us tell better stories of fictions past, present and future.

Registration link will be made available soon. Stay tuned.

Online ProgrammesSat, 25 Feb 2023 - 09:00 am
Dewesternisation or Decoloniality? Calling into Question the Planetary Future of Digital Sovereignty
Dewesternisation or Decoloniality? Calling into Question the Planetary Future of Digital Sovereignty
  • Aarti Sunder

Specter, Sovereignty, Surplus: Dewesternisation or Decoloniality? Calling into Question the Planetary Future of Digital Sovereignty

Speaker: Sebastián Lehuedé

Over the last decade, a number of groups have put into place digital sovereignty initiatives in different contexts to challenge the technological status quo. From state-led to bottom-up versions, most of these initiatives challenge the US technological hegemony. Against this backdrop, Dewesternisation or Decoloniality? Calling into Question the Planetary Future of Digital Sovereignty asks whether digital sovereignty can help advance what Latin American decolonial thinking calls decoloniality, i.e., enabling worlds that, unlike modernity, are not based on anthropocentric, heteropatriarchal, capitalist and racist structures.

Specter, Sovereignty, Surplus is a series of four conversations with artists and scholars on ideas around platforms and platformization as an expanded and broad context of online-offline relationships that brings bodies (human and non-human), digital conduits, physical infrastructures and the marketplace together. Rather than seeking additional definitions for platforms, these conversations look to offer methods of thinking around them, newer ways of perceiving and investigating interactions that stem from them.

About the speaker
Sebastián Lehuedé is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Centre of Governance and Human Rights, University of Cambridge. Applying Latin American decolonial theory, Sebastián's research focuses on the governance of digital technology in relation to global social justice. His work has been published in top journals including Information, Communication & Society, and was recently recognised with the 2022 Dissertation Award from the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR).

Register here

Online ProgrammesThu, 2 Feb 2023 - 06:00 pm
Sweet Pea: Your Other Progeny (Last Session on 11 Mar 12pm)
Sweet Pea: Your Other Progeny (Last Session on 11 Mar 12pm)
  • Jeannine Tang
  • Aarti Sunder

Sweet Pea: Your Progency is a series that features conversations between art and critical technoscience on intelligence, knowledge, and capacity. Each panel features artists and theorists who have troubled commonplace cultural investments in notions of intelligence, gender, sex and race as predictably inherited characteristics, by way of social questions of kinship, reproduction and labour. Across the hubs and labs of the university, spaces of interaction online and within the digital image, their work has traversed disciplines and forged uncommon kinships and collaborations. By bringing together technologies of machine and human intelligence with their symbolic, social and metaphoric worlds, these speakers weave together multiple feminisms on/offline, work between scientists and artists, relations of family and relationships with machines, entanglements between the living and (un)dead.

The title of this series cites Francis Galton’s 1875 growing of sweet peas to calculate the difference in weights between mother peas and their offspring, and his theorisations that variance between families nonetheless combined to produce a normally distributed population. Galton would subsequently substitute human characteristics for the use of sweet peas, producing eugenicist theories of human ancestral hereditary and earlier biometrical methods, which today traverse population sciences across technological, biological and social domains. Not only have sweet peas existed as a food source and subject for the development of technoscientific method, they have also since become an affectionate endearment, applied especially to young kin, offspring and companion pets. The storied life of sweet peas as subject and cultural metaphor arguably extends into the present, through advancements in technoscience and predictive temporalities, across smart technology and AI’s resuscitation of racial sciences of craniotomy and phrenology, the feminisation of digital assistance and companion robotics, fears of racial contamination and the unruliness of multiplicitous, indeterminate sex.

The work gathered here reflect strands of critical experimentalism in contemporary art in conjunction with technoscientific practise, while incorporating reflexive approaches to methods and machines, particularly with regards to their effects upon corporeal bodies and social identity, and enmeshment with population control across labour, welfare, health and security. Against the enclosure of futurity by cloned and coded pasts, these speakers have not shied away from machine and nonhuman forms of intelligence, but sought them out, while finding other ways to co-exist with other peoples, zombies, robots, and ancestors. Working beyond colonial dynamics of command and control, these speakers have given us other progenies, and offered them–and ourselves–other, more surprising futures.

For more information about each of the conversations under this programme, please visit the following links:

31 Jan, 9am (SGT): Cybercultures and Cyberfeminisms: Irina Aristarkhova, Maria Fernández, Mindy Seu, Margaret Tan (Talk)
25 Feb, 11am (SGT): Living and Undead Labour: A Conversation with David Bering-Porter & Aarti Sunder (Talk)
11 Mar, 11am (SGT): Binary Calculations and Inadequate to Assess Us: A Workshop with Stephanie Dinkins (Workshop)

This programme is curated by Jeannine Tang as part of the Singapore Biennale 2022 named Natasha, organised by the Singapore Art Museum, with support from SAM Residencies. Co-presented with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, New York.

Online ProgrammesSat, 11 Mar 2023 - 10:00 am
A Logistical Reckoning with Platform Economy's Self-governance
A Logistical Reckoning with Platform Economy's Self-governance
  • Aarti Sunder

Specter, Sovereignty, Surplus: A Logistical Reckoning with Platform Economy's Self-governance

Speaker: Akshaya Kumar

A Logistical Reckoning with Platform Economy's Self-governance will address how the promise of platform ecosystems is tied up with monopolistic ambitions and facilitation of logistical maneuvers. It will therefore bring the questions of political economy in conversation with algorithmic reconfigurations of everyday life.

Specter, Sovereignty, Surplus is a series of four conversations with artists and scholars on ideas around platforms and platformization as an expanded and broad context of online-offline relationships that brings bodies (human and non-human), digital conduits, physical infrastructures and the marketplace together. Rather than seeking additional definitions for platforms, these conversations look to offer methods of thinking around them, newer ways of perceiving and investigating interactions that stem from them.

About the speaker
Akshaya Kumar received his PhD in Film and Television Studies from the University of Glasgow, before joining IIT Indore as an Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. His essays have appeared in leading international journals including Social Text, Postmodern Culture, Media Industries and Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal. He is also author of the recently published Provincializing Bollywood: Bhojpuri Cinema in a Comparative Media Crucible (Oxford University Press, 2021).

Register here

Online ProgrammesTue, 31 Jan 2023 - 06:00 pm
Can you hear me ok
Can you hear me ok
  • Aarti Sunder

Spectre, Sovereignty, Surplus: Can you hear me ok?

Speaker: Adelita Husni-Bey

2020 was a strange year. Instead of waking up at 7am a couple of times a week and taking the subway into Manhattan, I set up my laptop in a small room in my apartment I am lucky enough to call an office. There, in trepidation, I would log on a few minutes before 9 and watch little screens pop up in unison, marked by names, by rooms, slightly different moods, lights, camera qualities: Can you hear me ok?

Some heads bob, others are still black screens - no way of knowing what entity lies beyond, we peer at each other through the raging unknown. Somehow I am supposed to hold this little collection of screens together, give me, us, a sense of purpose through this unpegged, unruly sequence of historical events, we are all experiencing, from our little rooms.

Specter, Sovereignty, Surplus is a series of four conversations with artists and scholars on ideas around platforms and platformization as an expanded and broad context of online-offline relationships that brings bodies (human and non-human), digital conduits, physical infrastructures and the marketplace together. Rather than seeking additional definitions for platforms, these conversations look to offer methods of thinking around them, newer ways of perceiving and investigating interactions that stem from them.

About the speaker
Adelita Husni-Bey is an artist and pedagogue invested in anarcho-collectivism, theater, and critical legal studies. She organizes workshops and produces publications, broadcasts, and exhibition work using noncompetitive pedagogical models through the framework of contemporary art. Involving activists, architects, jurists, schoolchildren, spoken-word poets, actors, urbanists, physical therapists, students, and teachers, her work consists of making sites in which to practice collectively. She was part of the Italian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017 with a video installation foregrounding anti-extractivist struggles and tarot reading as a pedagogical practice. She is a 2020–2022 Vera List Center Fellow with a project centered on the radical changes in social relations brought about by responses to past and current pandemics.

Register here

Online ProgrammesWed, 1 Feb 2023 - 06:00 pm
from friendster to finsta Workshop by Aarti Sunder
from friendster to finsta Workshop by Aarti Sunder
  • Aarti Sunder

Organized by Racy Lim, Ryan Loren Lee, Chand Chandramohan and Dylan Chan, from friendster to finsta is a participatory workshop that explores the parasocial dimension of current digital relationships. Together, participants and conductor-performers navigate the ever-changing cyber landscape of fiction, delusion and non-realities. Starting with an evolutionary journey of neo-2000s online platform interactions, the session eventually works with participants to discover new modes of living vicariously online—which personality to adopt, what missteps to avoid? Four conductor-performers provide the lesson of a lifetime. Participants walk away with cute tips, tricks and the power of a new fake instagram account. This is the non-place between dreams and reality.

Participants have to bring their phones with the Instagram app installed for this workshop.

from friendster to finsta is part of Aarti Sunder’s Platforms: Around, In-between and Through. Sunder’s research and practice lies at the crossroads of the digital humanities and contemporary art. She is interested in the fictions arising from investigating situated experiences and asking if these help us re-think the ways in which we understand technology and our relationship with it. So far she has focused on contemporary labour practices, fictional edges of protest, myth and digital-terrestrial play. Her interest is to problematize the determined linearity of ‘progress’ inscribed within the promise of the algorithm, technological prowess and a quantifiable future. Looking at globalised framework of precarious labour, non-human exhaustion and storytelling that lies at the strategic intersection of power, knowledge and aesthetics. Relooking at these intersections, she believes, can help us tell better stories, of fictions past, present and future.

Workshop Times
from friendster to finsta is conducted with multiple sessions. Participants can select any one of the sessions to attend:

  • 29 October 2022, 2pm - 3:30pm
  • 29 October 2022, 4pm - 5:30pm
  • 30 October 2022, 3pm - 4:30pm

SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark: Studio 3

SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark Sat, 29 Oct 2022 - 12:00 pm
Spectral Parkour
Spectral Parkour
  • Aarti Sunder

Specter, Sovereignty, Surplus: Spectral Parkour

Speaker: Out of Line

Spectral Parkour will be in the form of a score for a multi-vocal speech act, an internet radio broadcast from a self-hosted server, a drifting charge through the many tele-currents that we are entangled within and swept away by.

Specter, Sovereignty, Surplus is a series of four conversations with artists and scholars on ideas around platforms and platformization as an expanded and broad context of online-offline relationships that brings bodies (human and non-human), digital conduits, physical infrastructures and the marketplace together. Rather than seeking additional definitions for platforms, these conversations look to offer methods of thinking around them, newer ways of perceiving and investigating interactions that stem from them.

About the speaker
Out Of Line (Suvani Suri, Kaushal Sapre, Aasma Tulika, Radha Mahendru, Sonam Chaturvedi) is a working group of artists, researchers, designers interested in the expressive potential of telecom infrastructures.

Register here

Online ProgrammesMon, 30 Jan 2023 - 06:00 pm