China Residencies is excited to partner with Future of Memory to launch a new open call on algorithmic resistance.
All over the world, our words and online expression are being harvested for data, privatised for profit, and wielded to manipulate people’s ability to assemble in a truly public space and speak truth against injustice. Words online can spark hope, resistance and refusal – so who gets to shape the future of memory? For example, in the United States, companies such as Microsoft and Amazon train machine learning algorithms on biased data to create software that perpetuates entrenched inequality. Elsewhere, in the People’s Republic of China, private tech companies such as Tencent and Huawei embed automated tools such as OCR (optical character recognition) into their software. Images that contain text also become censorable, flattening events and collective histories into a single narrative. In light of increasing automated control everywhere, digital platforms have become an arena in which creative forms of opacity arise as people scramble to ‘fool the machine’ through clever use of homophones, memes, images, text, and new ways of writing to bypass OCR and evade specific censored keywords.
At the core of it, we cannot have fair and free digital expression online without having it offline. This three-month online residency programme in mid-June to mid-September is aimed at media artists and works around the theme of resisting and interrogating algorithmic surveillance and control. The residency will culminate in a public facing online digital arts festival where residents will showcase their work and lead public workshops.
The organisers are accepting fiction and nonfiction media arts projects.
Each resident or collective will be awarded an unrestricted stipend of USD $2000 for their participation, receive mentorship from Qianqian Ye and Xiaowei Wang, the two artists who created The Future of Memory as an online toolkit and provocation in 2019, and support from the China Residencies team.
Everyone is encouraged to apply, especially if you have never applied to anything in the past. The organisers are calling for individuals and collectives working in all types of creative practices, of all passports, ages, gender-identities, backgrounds, abilities, and interests to send proposals.
