Being Objects / Being AI— a workshop for UvA

Last week I was invited to give a seminar and workshop with the Anthropology Masters students at University of Amsterdam about putting my anthropology training into practice.

As part of that workshop I developed two activities to get the students to think about the world from unfamiliar perspectives using design fictions. One got them to be an object, the other to be an AI. They worked pretty well so I’m putting them out here in case anyone else wants to try them.

Context

20th century approaches to understanding systems suggested they have hard boundaries which can be observed and manipulated. But as Donna Haraway famously said, there’s no such thing as a “god’s eye view”. We live in a world of interconnecting biological, ecological, social and technical systems which are constantly adapting around us.

In the age of climate emergency and the exponential technology, it feels increasingly important to understand the world from non-human perspectives.

The field of Anthropology and Material Culture have been thinking about this for a while so there’s plenty of theory to draw on such as Actor Network Theory or Object Oriented Ontology. Ethnographies such as Anna Tsing’s Mushroom at the End of the World, which beautifully draws out the complex relationships between global supply chains and natural ecologies from the perspectives of a mushroom, show the value of deep engagement with non-human entities. And there are plenty of people doing creative experiments to actively shift how we relate to the world around us. From Kelly Dobson’s blender Blendie which has to be sung to in order to work to Joey Lee’s mildly terrifying transformation into a driverless car, these experiments take the theory and research and put them into playful practice.

Below is a description of the two activities I developed for the UvA students which builds on these ideas. I have included links to the worksheets which have further instructions and prompts in them. You can also access the full slides from the 2 hour session I ran at UvA here.

Being AI Activity: CAPTCHA Stories

This activity is inspired by Clive Thompson’s Article ‘Why CAPTCHA Pictures Are So Unbearably Depressing’. It’s aim is to give participants an embodied understanding of the limitations of training data for machine learning models.

• Imagine you are a computer vision AI getting taught to identify objects though CAPTCHA images.
• Look through the collection of CAPTCHA images in the worksheet. Analyse them to identify patterns and themes.
• Using the things you have observed from analysing the CAPTCHA images, write a description/ story of the world through the eyes of the machine learning system.
• Template/ worksheet with instructions and prompts

Being Objects Activity: Write a Host Instruction Manual

This activity is inspired by Simon Rebaudengo’s project Addicted Projects. It’s aim is to get participants to challenge their basic assumptions about commodities and the agency of objects.

• In a world where resources are growing scarce, people have to change their perspectives from owning objects to sharing them.
• Select an everyday electrical object — (eg: microwave / hair dryer / washing machine etc..). Imagine it cannot be owned, it can only be hosted. In order for you to use it, you must be a good host. If not, it will move on to another host.
• Write an instruction manual for how to host this object in a way that meets the needs of the object.
• Template/ worksheet with instructions and prompts