Configure-Able Infrastructures
NEoN is excited to work with George Simms and invites you to ‘Configure-Able Infrastructures’, a series of online workshops exploring care and self-exploration enabled through life-affirming infrastructures. We will be joined by Melt (Ren Britton & Iz Paehr) to explore incendiary emails for change-making and SysterServer (Ai Carmela & OOOOO) to discuss the anarcha feminist cyborg hacker uprising.
George Simms is a researcher/hacker/designer/instigator/teacher developing how digital infrastructures can be done otherwise through crip and trans*feminist approaches. His practice focuses on collectively redistributing the hierarchies of technologies and radically (from the root) re-imagining the abilities they can enable within us and our society.
About the Workshops
Configure-Able Methods are rooted in the work of enabling intersectional critiques into the methods and imaginaries of sociotechnical systems, at its core asking how this knowledge can help us transform destructive relations into ones of care. Self-exploration enabled through life-affirming infrastructures and informed by the radical work of Sins Invalid and Healing Justice London, transforming community and disability justice through the voices, experiences, and methods of those living through it. Following this agenda, configure-able methods aims to be a generative toolset to reconfigure these infrastructures into ones that can be lead from their subject and not from a generalized and prescribed overview. This reconfiguring toolset aims to transform the imaginaries of a big tech into minor, subjective, and dynamic ones, enabling people to have abilities over how their digital infrastructures are imagined as and how this comes into being.
Through two workshops, we aim to discuss how MELT (crip artists, designers and hackers), as well as Syster Server (feminist system administration collective), have already started these reconfiguring practices and what we can learn from their imaginings, matterings and experiences from practising them. This is very much the start of this conversation of configure-able methods, and all are welcome to join in and bring their own experiences, questions, and thoughts.
Access Sparks: incendiary emails for change-making
Melt (Ren Britton & Iz Paehr):
19th July 12:30 pm – 15:30 pm
An online link will be provided after registration
ACCESS SERVER is an email server that anonymizes, collects and financially compensates access requests that disabled people send towards cultural institutions. Access requests explain what a disabled person needs to attend spaces, be they online or physical. ACCESS SERVER works against exclusions by uplifting and upholding our beloved disability communities: together, we work to disrupt systemic ableism in cultural institutions. In this workshop on ACCESS SERVER, we will unfold our project in three sections: first, through an introduction to the ableist conditions that this project refuses by upholding expressions of disabled brilliance and our needs, secondly through an introduction to the project itself and its mechanisms and thirdly through practising access practices together by writing emails to cultural institutions in order to transform institutionalised ableism as we know them.
Organizing the anarcha feminist cyborg hacker uprising
SysterServer (Ai Carmela & OOOOO)
2nd August, 14:30 pm – 16:30 pm
An online link will be provided after registration
We are cyborg hackers trapped in a dystopia. Cyborg is our species, hacker is our class and we are dominated, exploited and manipulated by vectoralist corporations like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. The vectoralist class advertises their Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a God on top of a cloud. We should be aware that “the cloud” is a lot of computers, filled with data stolen from us, wasting energy, natural and human resources to develop “the AI” which is an algorithm for reproducing the matrix of domination, while the world around us is falling apart as an ecological consequence.
To organize an insurrection against vectoralism and their classist, racist, ableist, specieist, cisheteropatriarchal AI, we have to create our own tools because “the masters tools will never dismantle the masters house”. Building on the theories, histories and politics described in “Feminist Ninja: upgrading intersectional feminism with the hacker class”
Please register by filling in the FORM HERE to join one or both workshops.
NEoN’s public events and activities will be hosted wherever possible using open-source technology. All information will be provided.
About George Simms
George Simms is a researcher/hacker/designer/instigator/teacher developing how digital infrastructures can be done otherwise through crip and trans*feminist approaches. They are currently a PhD candidate in Digital Arts and Technology at i-DAT University of Plymouth, holding a MA in Computational Arts from Goldsmiths and a BA in Fine Art Sculpture from Camberwell College of Art. His practice focuses on collectively redistributing the hierarchies of technologies and radically (from the root) re-imagining the abilities they can enable within us and our society. His current research is developing intelligent recommender systems (RS) through configure-able methods exploring how RS can be adaptable to different sets of values and needs. This work is being materialised through experimental digital tools, speculative research projects and workshops. George Simms is also a founding member of in-grid collective and Imaginary Practices Studio.
Recording & Transcribing
Due to accessibility requirements within our team, all NEoN online meetings are live transcribed and managed via Otter.com. This is also for staff who cannot attend, prefer to review the content after the event for better comprehension, or don’t have a reliable or stable internet connection. These are anonymised and permanently erased when no longer required. Our Privacy Policy outlines how your personal information is collected, used and treated.
This work and research are part of George Simms’s PhD research at the University of Plymouth, looking into crip and trans*feminist approaches to/critiques of AI recommender systems, automating infrastructures and collective knowledge-making, exploring methods of how we can do this otherwise.
These events will be recorded for potential referral in this research to share the resources and make the knowledge accessible. Please let us know if you do not want to be included in these recordings.
Online Code of Conduct
NEoN is dedicated to providing a respectful environment for everyone in our online programme and any activities requiring in-person attendance.
