Tuesday, October 24, 5-6:30pm (Phelps 6206C)

What is the sound of racialization? How might we listen to misrecognition? What does machine error tell us about the precision of racism? And how can the tools of a racist system be used to transcribe new forms of resistance?

This experimental presentation is a collaboration between feminist technoscience researcher Thao Phan and Machine Listening, an ongoing investigation and experiment in collective learning, instigated by artist Sean Dockray, legal scholar James Parker, and researcher, curator and artist Joel Stern.

Part lecture and part performance, this event brings together critical work on race and algorithmic culture with new techniques for dissecting and analysing automatic speech recognition, applied to personal and public archives drawn from Thao’s life and research. It features a discussion and demonstration of the Word Processor tool, developed in 2021 by the Machine Listening team and Reduct, a US-based tech company co-founded by the artist Robert Ochschorn.

Thao Phan is a feminist science and technology studies (STS) researcher who specializes in the study of gender and race in algorithmic culture. She is a Research Fellow in the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society and the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.

Thao has published on topics including the aesthetics of digital voice assistants, big-data-driven techniques of racial classification, and the commercial capture of AI ethics research. Her writing has appeared in journals such as Big Data & Society, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, Science as Culture, Cultural Studies, and more.

Thao is a member of the Australian Academy of Science’s National Committee for the History and Philosophy of Science and is the co-founder of AusSTS—Australia’s largest network of STS scholars.