Final Project (Dalia Hatalova)

I was deciding between two topics for my final paper and decided to extend the work I had done for my presentation. However, I had some initial struggles in centering my analysis so that it would form a coherent research paper. Eventually, focusing on Inside Out through the lens of digital studies became the core of my work, as I explored the concept of technologization that I find to be the reverse of anthropomorphism. As interlocutors, Wendy Chun's and Jonathan Beller's respective research were the most useful, as my work discusses the changing of human self-perception with contemporary technology. Below is my project summary in the form of an abstract. 

In the information economy, garnering data from users requires discrete forms of information that are computable, leading to the abstraction of human processes to be algorithmically readable. Artificial intelligence technology is developed to resemble and be responsive to humans, but simultaneously contemporary media attempts to reconstitute human emotions and cognition. Disney Pixar's Inside Out visually technologizes internal human functioning through the medium of animation as highly discrete and industrialized. The quotidian world of Inside Out's protagonist, Riley, is intercut with the representation of her cognition. As these images simplify the complex neurological functioning of the brain into personable characters, they simultaneously require interrogation in view of the proliferation of digital technology in the twenty-first century. This article examines Inside Out's internal world construction by utilizing research on artificial intelligence, algorithms, digital infrastructures, and information capitalism. 

Final Project - Maggie Roberts

For this project I am expanding on my class presentation about creative coding, looking at expressive programming through Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s installation “Can’t Help Myself” (2016). Commissioned for the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, the pair of artists built an industrial robot, armed with plastic brush strokes, emulating both a shovel and a paintbrush, at the end of the artificial limb. Secured at the center of a tank, the machine is surrounded by censors and blood-like liquid fills the space. As the red goo oozes closer to the censors, the robot is programmed to contain the substance, frantically pushing it back into place. The whole process is messy and ineffective leaving violent streaks of red across the room and splattering it on the walls, staining the once untainted surface. The robot’s movements are dramatic and overemphasized, being coded with thirty-two unique motions, all with different names, including “scratch an itch,” “bow and shake,” and “ass shake” (Weng, 2016). The digital performance walks the line between choreography and function, absurd and mundane, creative and industrial. By existing in all of these realms and never entirely committing to one, “Can’t Help Myself” mobilizes theories of “the digital” to comment on the reductive view of technology as a purely functional tool and, I would also argue, critiques labor practices within these same technology-based industrial fields.

Some theoretical texts and authors that I will be drawing upon to ground my close reading of this artwork are Wendy Chun, Lisa Nakamura, Alexander R. Galloway and Kara Keeling, among others. I am interested in the way Yuan and Yu’s piece stakes a claim for humanities scholarship within the digital through affect theory specifically. Creative coding is both a practical tool and ephemeral exercise which oscillates between functional, social and cultural paradigms. It is this interdisciplinary quality of the multimedia artform which opens-up new generative avenues for contemporary and experimental art, film and video which I feel deserves serious critical study.

Here is a video clip of the exhibit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX6C6xY86-c 

Final Project - Julia Rose Camus

AI Photography - Visual Poetry (Synthesis and Translation)

For this project, I was inspired by the ways in which artists are able to interact with code and machinery as a means of producing new multimodal and collaborative forms of art. As a photographer, there is a strange sense of marvel and also resentment when it comes to considering the ability of AI's to digitally generate the kinds of images it takes artists hours to produce. My way of dealing with this tension has been through a kind of collaborative effort with AI. I will often provide it with an image I have shot, see what the AI has produced, and then digitally paint over that result. Other times, I will feed one same image through the same AI multiple times, and then paint the result onto a physical canvas. I find this kind of artistic collaboration to be innovative and exciting, while also still feeling like I am rooted in my craft as an artist. We are working together to produce something new, without any limitations. 

This kind of dialectical exchange with AI has helped me contemplate new theoretical inquiries into computation, notably through the ideas of visual translation and semiotics. I have been curious to consider all the ways in which I can creatively challenge an AI in order to push the boundaries of "visual translation." In this sample of my project, I used the poem "The Fire" from Louise Glück's collection The House on Marshland (1975). I gave the AI each stanza to interpret, and made variations until the poetic sentiment of each image felt write, and digitally wrote each stanza on its corresponding image. 

This project has felt exhilarating in many ways, and I hope to be able to visually translate many poems in this way, whether in the work of a single author, or by following a variety of poetic themes across the works of multiple authors.

You can find bigger versions of these images here:

https://www.juliarosecamus.com/photography-portfolio#/pageai/

Final Project - Hyejoo

From top to bottom, the videos below: Japanese YouTuber "Nao" and South Korean YouTuber "sueddu."

These videos are all examples of what I call "domesticity vlogs," which you may find quite unique in comparison to the more celebrity-style vlogs of North American contexts. Domesticity vlogs are incredibly aestheticized treatments of the women's homes, domestic labor, and household objects, all alongside a sense of anonymity and visual obscurity of the YouTuber herself. I've written about this YouTube genre before, positing that these videos generate a new definition of home as an affective experience over a material asset, especially more so in our contemporary milieu of housing affordability crises.

Through this class, however, I've been wanting to further consider what the digital affords for these women vloggers. The domesticity vlog has become such a big phenomenon especially through YouTube in Korea and Japan, having become a recognizable aesthetic traceable in feature films as well such as Little Forest (2014 original in Japan; 2019 remake in Korea). Occupying a niche but popular segment of the Web, it is undeniable that YouTube, and the Internet more generally, offers something to this genre.

It's an aesthetic reminiscent of Jeanne Dielman (1975) and other 1970s feminist films that often portrayed women's interiorities through the home in vérité style, but how domesticity vlogs differ is that for all their quotidian events, veracity or authenticity are not the point. Domesticity vlogs are inherently aestheticized and idealized portrayals of a woman's interior life––a performance, if you will.

So, in my project I aim to tackle two main lines of inquiry: how contemporary female subjectivity is conditioned by performance, and how this performance on a digital platform like YouTube and in our digital age more broadly challenges how we navigate the digital. Here's one tentative conclusion: in "Liveness, Presence, and Performance in Contemporary Digital Media" (2012), Bolter et al. suggest that the genre of machinima is a misappropriation of the "narcissistic play" of video games, a "closed loop" much in the same way self-filming was for Rosalind Krauss ("Video, the Aesthetics of Narcissism"). In short, games and self-filming are like a mirror function for the player/performer. But machinima, by being an "overtly performative genre... breaks the digital loop... because it is made with the assumption of an audience rather than the split subject [split into viewer and object]" (Bolter et al., 332). Breaking this narcissistic loop to include an audience is what makes machinima an instance of highly-mediated liveness, of performance in a digital age, of something more critical than narcissistic play. 

I see something similar in the performative nature of domesticity vlogs, where the women vloggers 1. fully embrace mediation while evoking authenticity (as if domesticity is a game they are now "misappropriating"), thereby 2. arresting into view not herself (as she is mediated, performing, teasing the line between authentic vs. fake, unstable and illegible), but the spectator (who is assumed in the performance, whose presence is arrested and made live amidst their digital perusals).

Max Berwald – Final Project

I have been torn between a difficult paper topic and an easier paper topic and I am leaning towards the more difficult paper topic. As I mentioned very briefly in a previous blog post, I’ve been getting very interested in the CHIPS Act, US policy with regards to semiconductors, and the role of semiconductors in the US-Taiwan relationship.

Recently, the US has identified Taiwan’s dominant role in the production of advanced microchips (something like 90% of global supply for certain kinds of advanced chips) as a major national security problem. In Taiwan, this “problem” had previously been described as a “silicone shield,” the idea being that Taiwan’s indispensability in global supply chains because of its contribution in this difficult area would protect it (welding US national security every more tightly to Taiwan’s own national security via digital infrastructure). The CHIPS Act appropriates 52 billion USD for the onshoring of advanced semiconductor manufacture to the US. At the same time, the Biden administration is beginning to experiment with using intellectual property rights to prevent companies all over the world involved in the processes of advanced semiconductor manufacture from doing business with PRC companies. This is driving bifurcation in a highly globalized industry: the PRC cannot abandon advanced computing (long term economic development and national security both depend on it) so it will have to pursue its own independent development of advanced semiconductors. (This is tremendously wasteful from a global perspective.) Everyone goes on and on about how difficult this process will be, but no one denies that it’s pretty much the only course (if the US government is set on preventing Chinese access to these technologies). 

These developments fascinate me for a number of reasons. For my final paper, I want to think about how to integrate this new chapter into the military history of computing. On the one hand, much of the technology behind computing, semiconductor manufacture, and microchip design was done in US military labs. In this sense, the implementation of conspicuous industrial policy related to the long term future of this technology is a continuity. Semiconductors are the perfect example of a technology that it is difficult for the market to afford to innovate and develop on its own. On the other hand, consumerism and market forces have also played a decisive role in the development of this technology between the 1950s and the present. In his recent book on the history of the semiconductor and its current foreign policy dimensions, Chip War, Chris Miller argues that it was the emergence of mass consumer culture in the postwar US that allowed corporations to make enormous advances in miniaturization. (The USSR, he argues, was unable to do this for the same reason, despite a concerted, long term period of state investment.) That is, while a socialized, government-subsidy model was required to make the initial breakthroughs, the gift of these breakthroughs to private corporate actors, and their repackaging of them for a variety of consumer applications, is what allowed these technologies to develop into their present forms. I want to integrate this back and forth motion into both the history of computing as a military technology and into a contemporary understanding of what militarism is. My thinking here is that this trajectory could shed light on the relationship between consumer culture and militarism, and I’m not sure that this has been written about before. If consumerism and consumer electronics were essential to the process of developing technologies that are now so essential to the US military that they have to be re-securitized, made secret, and even onshored at tremendous cost, does that mean that the US species of militarism also has a deeply consumerist quality to it? Reading recommendations are welcome, because I may only think this is interesting because I haven’t read the right articles.

I can’t emphasize enough that, prior to the last three weeks, I really knew nothing about semiconductors, so I’m entering at the ground floor. Recommendations and condemnations both welcome.

[Ray Kyooyung Ra, Final Project] "Digits"

For my final project, I took a creative direction to choreograph a concept art video titled: "Digits." The dance genre you see in the above video is called "waacking," (alternatively spelled "whacking," originally called "punking" in the 1970s Los Angeles gay disco scene) which is a strand of old school street dance subculture that I perform and research. The dance form is inherently dramatic and expressive, which makes it a good medium to visualize vastly comprehensive concepts such as 'the digital,' I think.

"Digits" represents the amorphousness of the digital. The dancer's face is covered with a dark veil, his body silhouetted against low-key back/side lights. While the performer's form is barely visible, his LED-lit fingers stand out against the dark. 'Fingers,' 'digits,' 'digital' -- it's a play on words. Much of the visuality and movement was inspired by oceanic waves as well as the line-node patterns of semiconductor circuits. And while the performer's luminous digits caress and outline his shadows in the aforementioned motifs, visibility and legibility of form is still very much compromised.

While planning out this performance piece, lyrics like "I've traveled the world and the seven seas" or the pre-chorus ("Some of them want to abuse you/ Some of them want to be abused") from Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" stood out to me when looking for a song to encompass our semester's understanding of the digital. The most difficult part of the process was making the choreography as dynamic as possible while being stationary and having my vision compromised. Hopefully, the editing and post-production did the piece justice.

Final Project - Hamsini

 

My final paper will build on my presentation in class a couple of weeks ago thinking through the materiality of the cloud. Specifically, I want to explore the environmental imaginaries (Peet & Watts, 2004) of digital infrastructures through a reading of the aesthetics and discourses of sustainability that permeate three facets of Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure. How is this imaginary of sustainability (as a response to a particular problematization of environment) shaping and reshaping layered infrastructures of energy, data, and knowledge?

Powering Data Centers: The first project I want to look at is Microsoft’s efforts to increase the sustainability of its data center infrastructure through renewable energy goals and increased efficiency of computational processes, as refracted through the lens of its Story Labs “We Live in the Cloud” virtual datacenter microsite and related materials.

Cloud for Sustainability: Next, I will turn to how Microsoft markets its “Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability” tools, which allow clients to deploy Azure to standardize environmental monitoring data about their activities, increase the efficiency of IT infrastructures, and reduce environmental impact. (This includes reporting on the environmental impact of the Microsoft services these companies use.)

Planetary Computer: Finally, I want to probe the Microsoft AI for Earth “Planetary Computer,” which seeks to provide data infrastructure for conservation purposes, hosting “petabytes of environmental monitoring data” made accessible through APIs, a development environment, and partners’ applications. (Which, of course, makes no reference to the environmental impact of Azure.)

Literatures: This paper will draw on infrastructure studies (Edwards, Parks, Ensmenger, Hogan), looking at the ways in which digital data infrastructures are layered on non-digital infrastructures, such as power and water systems, emphasizing the materiality of these infrastructures even as Microsoft’s imaginary of sustainability abstracts from that materiality. I want to read closely the discourses and aesthetics of sustainability in these projects as a particular kind of “environmental imaginary” composed of an economic and efficiency-based model of environmental datafication and accounting; “nature” images of clouds, greenery, and Earth as the pale blue dot; and a kind of speculative, projected futurity to sustainability “goals.” To understand this imaginary, I will delve into work unpacking the cloud metaphor (Mosco, 2014; Hu, 2015; Peters, 2015), images of the planetary (Halpern, 2021), and the speculative elements of data and algorithms (Hong, 2020). In this, my paper builds on recent work by Pasek (2019) and Lukacz (2022) that respectively tackle Microsoft’s “fungible mediation” of cloud and carbon in its data centers and the infrastructuring of environmental data used in environmental research by Microsoft’s corporate logics.

Final Project - Rohan

My final paper will build on my presentation in the Surveillance week about data subject access requests (DSAR) under data protection regulations such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

My approach to this topic builds on literature we have read in class about critical approaches to studying data, specifically by Andrejevic (2017), Cheney-Lippold (2017), Chun (2021), and Gaboury (2018). Their analyses focus on data collection, computation, and application, and thus center companies and other surveillant actors that collect and use digital data. However, I will also draw on critical data studies literature that points to different entry points in the genealogy of data, such as collection, storage, manipulation, abstraction, and sharing (e.g., Denton et al., 2021).

DSAR datasets represent a different moment in the genealogy of data: disclosure. Prior work has examined the politics of data disclosures. In particular, I have been reading work by Poirier (2022) in which she analyzes public data disclosures—either as regulatory requirements or transparency efforts by government agencies—as cultural texts that offer a unique epistemic vantage point through which we can learn not only about data but also about processes that accompany datafication.

In contrast, DSAR datasets are private, individualized disclosures. Most prior work I have read on individual disclosures are interested in individuals’ responses—for example, how their feelings or attitudes toward products or values change in response to awareness about data collection. But analyzing public stakes of individual disclosures is not without precedent. For example, Browne’s (2015) anecdote about filing FOIA requests to examine how Fanon had been surveilled reminds us that there is much to learn from traces of individualized surveillance.

Nevertheless, there is a novelty to DSAR datasets, primarily because GDPR and CCPA have begun taking effect in the past four years. Interest in and access to DSAR datasets is likely to increase as beneficiaries of each regulation take advantage of their new rights. In addition, new data protection regulations are being passed every year, many of which are modeled after GDPR and/or CCPA. Therefore, the politics of DSAR datasets are increasingly relevant.

My questions are: What are the cultural politics of DSAR disclosure datasets? What do they reveal about datafication and what are their potential implications for conceptualizing, imagining, and re-imagining data policy?

In terms of methods, I am interested in applying a framework offered by Poirier (2021) for studying datasets. She distinguishes between three approaches: a denotative approach examines technical definitions to clarify what data exists in a dataset, a connotative approach analyzes the implied cultural grammar, and a deconstructive approach scrutinizes absences in what is represented.

At the same time, I am also interested in thinking about DSAR disclosure datasets as technological products that prefigure their users and uses. To accommodate this, I’m interested in applying the walkthrough method (Light et al., 2018) on the DSAR disclosure datasets that I have received over the years from various apps and services. The walkthrough method is a way of reading a technical interface that combines STS with cultural studies. It begins with first selecting an object, like a mobile app, and evaluating its sociocultural and economic context by examining things like who created it, how it makes money, who can access it, why it was created. The second step is to step through the app, screen by screen, to systematically engage with it as an ideal user. The final step is to analyze these two sets of observations to explore the implications of the app’s structure, its origin, its expectations, and so forth. This approach complements Poirier’s modes of analysis by reading the expectations imposed by the app upon the user.

I will apply these methods to three DSAR disclosure datasets—likely from utility, media, and social apps. Ultimately, I’m excited to think through the public stakes of DSAR disclosure datasets as a way to think about the politics of data protection and privacy policy.


References

Andrejevic, M. (2017). To pre-empt a thief. International Journal of Communication, 11, 879–896.

Browne, S. (2015). Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Duke University Press.

Cheney-Lippold, J. (2017). We are Data: Algorithms and the Making of our Digital Selves. NYU Press.

Chun, W. H. K. (2021). Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition. MIT Press.

Denton, E., Hanna, A., Amironesei, R., Smart, A., & Nicole, H. (2021). On the genealogy of machine learning datasets: A critical history of ImageNet. Big Data & Society, 8(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211035955

Gaboury, J. (2018). Becoming NULL: Queer relations in the excluded middle. Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 28(2), 143-158. https://doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2018.1473986

Light, B., Burgess, J., & Duguay, S. (2018). The walkthrough method: An approach to the study of apps. New Media & Society, 20(3), 881–900. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816675438

Poirier, L. (2021). Reading datasets: Strategies for interpreting the politics of data signification. Big Data & Society, 8(2), 20539517211029320. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211029322

Poirier, L. (2022). Accountable data: The politics and pragmatics of disclosure datasets. ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 1446–1456. https://doi.org/10.1145/3531146.3533201

Final Project -- Mahnoor

The Digital Museum

For my final project, I will consider the evolving relationship between the museum, as cultural institution and physical space, and the digital or virtual realm. More and more museums are digitizing not only their collections but gallery space itself. Not only can you browse a museum's collection through a slideshow function on its website, you can virtually meander through it. Here, for example, is a gallery in the Art Institute of Chicago. On a personal level, I was initially delighted to "walk through" the Art Institute. But as I continued to move from room to room, I came to the eerie realization that the space felt wrong. There is not another visitor in sight. Virtualizing the museum space certainly has upsides--it makes visiting a museum more accessible. However, at the same time, it alters the nature of the space completely, morphing a communal experience into a solitary one.

Further, while virtual museum spaces may be more accessible, there are still pitfalls. Digitizing collections, for example, has reinforced hierarchies of art rooted in imperial modes of cultural consumption. There was an interesting article published last year analyzing how the Google Arts and Culture platform, on which one can find the virtual Art Institute, has enacted “an unintentional digital amplification of conventional traditions of art collection and interpretation that dominate museum displays in larger Western cities” (Kizhner et al.). This digital re-inscription of harmful conceptions of the Other is something we have seen in Chun, Crawford, and many other scholars we have read this semester.

I am also interested in other topics within the broad umbrella of "The Digital Museum," which is one of the reasons I have decided to format my project according to the third provided project option, a three-article series written with the intention to submit to platforms like mediacommons or Flow Journal. While my first article will focus on the Google Arts and Culture platform, I also plan to explore the effect of the pandemic on museum spaces and the emergence of websites like VOMA, a virtual museum with no physical site whatsoever. Can a space like this, so radically different from a brick-and-mortar museum, even still be called a museum? Or is one's visual and tactile engagement with it more like one's engagement with a video game or a film? Is it a different kind of space, a new kind of medium or platform, all together?

Pratik Nyaupane final project

 My final project is a continuation of the ideas discussed during my presentation during the week we read and explored surveillance. Just as a refresher, I touched on the stadium, as a site where surveillance and datafication have significantly influenced. The stadium is a unique space that allows for meaning-making practices of community and belonging for many, yet the same space has also been one of difference, exclusion, control, and hyper-surveillance. My final paper will investigate how the technologization of the world’s game, soccer, or football as it is called around the globe, has allowed for the articulation, promotion, and authorization of violent and invasive surveillance and screening practices at the sports venues and beyond, reconstructing their spatial logic and effectively transforming the spectators’ experience. Stadia as significant sites for performing the nation in multiple ways, serve as an impetus for the state to exercise power and reconfigure dynamics of violence in various forms.  

The narrative that champions the use of technology as the way of sterilizing the stadia from violence, threats, and difference, conceals the displacement that precedes gentrification; the corporate interests in extracting data; the exclusionary and racial logic upon which the police operate, and how both players and fans embody the anxieties and tensions of nationalism and technologization in the global era. Thus, this project questions how the technologization of the stadium reconfigures how the space is socially, materially, and aesthetically constructed. Particularly I want to explore and investigate how the technologization of stadium produces knowledge informed by and that recursively shapes hegemonic logics of race, gender, class, and other demographic identities.

For the scope of this paper, I plan to analyze and investigate the recently built Banc of California Stadium, a soccer-specific stadium near Downtown Los Angeles and the campus of the University of Southern California. I contextualize the technologization of “The Banc” as it is referred to by its frequent patrons but through the framework of globalization, where the stadium is often a microcosm of the community or region it resides in. Globally, technological implementation has started to transform how the space inside and around the stadium is constructed, navigated, and experienced. However, it is also imperative to situate the stadium’s relationship with Los Angeles, valuing the rich historical and cultural understanding of the city and its members who play an important role as the subjects of spectators and the surveilled.

The Banc of California stadium, unlike other technologically advanced stadiums such as SoFi in Inglewood or Crypto.com Arena in Downtown Los Angeles, presents a uniqueness that allows for a rich cultural and localized analysis. The stadium was built specifically for the Los Angeles Football Club (LAFC) of Major League Soccer (MLS), who in their five short years have already created a community of members that dictate the culture of support. On any given match day, the stadium is occupied by a union of supporter groups who each equally share a passion not only for LAFC, but for their Korean heritage, or with the LGBTQ+ community, the Palestinian liberation movement, or other political and social causes (Barajas, 2022). The entire “North End” of the Banc has space for 3252 individuals and is a safe standing area, designed after the result of several stadium tragedies from overcrowding, stampeding, and crushing fatalities from various parts of the world but mainly the Hillsborough disaster in 1989 (Henderson et al, 2019). Not only is the North End of the Banc, safe standing, but is regarded as a “safe space” where members of marginalized identities are not only present, but openly displaying their identities through flags, chants, and banners. 

In many American sports, there is a strong nationalist and patriotic component to the performance within the stadium, and while that does exist in American soccer, the supporters and players often challenge those hegemonic ideas of American-ness. At a Major League Soccer match, one may likely see flags of other countries (including non-Latin American countries such as Palestine and Catalonia) more than the flag of the United States. With the prevalence of media objects that openly display signages of the Palestinian flag, gay and trans rights, anti-fascist and anti-Nazi slogans, and anti-state slogans (Zirin & Boykoff, 2019), I am fascinated by the ways in which security and surveillance technologies are deployed in the stadium to surveil the crowd. Ultimately, I am looking to investigate the stadium through the grounded frameworks that help critique and understand the notion of the datafied stadium and surveillance mechanisms through corporate and state authorities. 

Marisol Vasquez, Final Presentation

 

Introduction

For my presentation, I had planned on presenting some of the evidence and thinking behind a larger project. Broadly construed this piece will relate to questions regarding race, labor, and technology. In particular, I am interested in the role of silica—as an environmental material appearing in the history of computation—and its material relations related to devalued labor of sex work in a global Asias context. I’m adding some descriptions beneath my original slides, but I had planned on articulating some connections behind my objects of interest and precedents for my thinking. 

This quote appears in a passage from The World Computer, which Tania disliked, but I have been thinking about it quite literally in regards to silica as the materiality and metaphor of skin in the devalued labor of anthropomorphic AI sex robots. 

While I might be taking the quote related to silica out of context, I am still inspired by its provocation to consider the racialization of Asianness as devalued labor across the Transpacific—not only in terms of the visibility of ‘sex dolls,’ but also the invisibility of Asian labor in Southeast Asia and China constituting the material relations of mining silica, the laborers molding and painting the silica in factories, along with the materiality of silica as part of computation itself within AI sex robots. 

Silica sand mining has a strong projected growth rate in the Asia Pacific region. 

This article appears in Verge: Global Asias and discusses sand, silica, and silicon as different territories. This author also discusses where silica / silicon appear in undersea cables. I am perhaps situating this inquiry in a Transpacific context combining the overlap between Global Asias and Asian American, as part of a racialization of Asianness (the last point on Asian American coming later). 

Inspiration and Precedents

In the next slides, I discuss some earlier precedents and inspiration for this project. I wrote this project to consider Asian fashion labor, as set forth by scholars like Minh-Ha T. Pham and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu. Here’s a short abstract: 

By analyzing the fashion performances of CFGNY, a queer Asian diasporic art collective, and their conceptual garments, this essay addresses the broader contradictions emergent between the visible and invisible race and class representations of Asian fashion labor in global capitalism. By deploying Jose Esteban Muñoz’s brown worldings, this article argues that CFGNY's construction of conceptual garments and their accompanying performances generate countervisualities through an attunement to brownness that troubles the dominant hegemony of fashion capitalism’s visuality. These countervisualities index to a temporal and spatial logic that disorients and collapses the uneven race and class hierarchies within contemporary Asian fashion labor and the afterlives of colonial labor from the Asian trades.

I am basically modulating this interested in Asian labor and how it emerges in Asian diasporic visual art and cultures (more on that down below). However, now I am focusing on sexuality inscribed into Asianness within a global framework.

I view Huan He’s work as a precedent to my research interests, not only for this project, but also for my dissertation interests. This passage offers a brief summary of his project. 

Primary Sources

I wrote a blog post about this film, it’s a recent documentary about China’s class hierarchies. I would consider this a Chinese-American and diasporic film because Kingdon is a Chinese American film director and much of her interest in starting this documentary originates from trying to understand or make sense of her heritage located in China, and feeling abstracted or distanced from it. This distance is often apparent through the observational mode of this documentary. I am interested in how and why Kingdon films the production of sex dolls as devalued form of labor related to gender, sexuality, and race.

This film, Air Doll by Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, postulates a sentience within a blow-up sex doll. She has a silicone genitalia. This film, I believe, uses the performance of silicon as materiality and metaphor tied to the sexuality inscribed into Asianness. I’m not sure if this portrayal relates to Japanese comfort women. I’ve also been researching a bit on this article “Racist Attachments: Dakko-chan, Black Kitsch, and Kawaii Culture” by Erica Kanesada, even though this article isn't completely related to my interest, I think it sets a precedent for some of my concerns regarding commodification and circulation of a good.

Secondary Literatures

The Hypersexuality of Race by Celine Parreñas Shimizu

Traffic in Asian Women by Hyun Yi Kang

Dealing in Desire by Kimberly Kay Hoang

are some examples that have discussed sexuality, sex work, and Asian women.

Surrogate Humanity by Kalindi Vora and Neda Atanasoski

The World Computer by Jonathan Beller

The Digitally Disposed by Seb Franklin

Working Abstract (Rough Draft)