#SOPHYGRAY: A Feminist Audio Bot Workshop by Nadja Verena Marcin
#SOPHYGRAY: A Feminist Audio Bot Workshop by Nadja Verena Marcin Sunday, December 11th 11 A.M. to 1:30 P.M. RSVP What would Alexa say if she was incarnated as a radical feminist? Has Siri ever read bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Silvia Federici, or Donna Haraway—and does she know what Cyberchimera means? How can a feminist dataset be created to train a machine differently? Would you like to learn how to design entries for a feminist bot?
Program Format:
The #SOPHYGRAY workshop invites you to put inspiring, thoughtful, and groundbreaking words into the mouths of our daily virtual assistants, in this case the feminist audiobot #SOPHYGRAY. In the form of a Write-a-Thon, developed by Nadja Verena Marcin, currently artist-in-residence of the European Media Art Platform 2022 at Onassis Stegi, you are invited to learn about creating and writing audio bot entries. On December 22, with permission from participants, the results will be included in a presentation at Onassis Cultural Center in Athens. This online Write-a-Thon via Zoom will start with a conversation between Nadja Verena Marcin and Anthony Huffman, researcher, independent curator, and cultural critic.
Join our think tank and share the most pressing, hilarious, and absurd questions surrounding feminism and our everyday lives. The resulting topics, questions, and answers will be sent to the feminist chatbot #SOPHYGRAY to sharpen its mind and further transform its conversations.
Learn:
As part of the workshop, participants will gather online and work together to make the audio bot "Sophy" wittier by suggesting a series of themes and designing entries themselves after a short introduction to the audio bot software. Later, these contributions will be reflected inside the publicly available app where "Sophy" will be available for chats and conversations. #SOPHYGRAY serves as a starting point to think about our relationship with AI-driven virtual assistants, and their role in our lives and in shaping gender dynamics. It offers an opportunity to learn together about feminist writers and to put their ideas into practice. As a result, #SOPHYGRAY will get “smarter” through the diverse viewpoints of participants, sharing their feminist perspectives, concerns, and thoughts.
Participation:
No prior special knowledge is needed to take part in this workshop. Participants are kindly invited to bring with them any needs for the event, such as references to feminist literature on topics of their interest (optional). Space in the Zoom breakout rooms is limited, we encourage potential attendees to sign up early and register for the event.
Deadline: 11:59pm (ET) on Saturday, December 10, 2022
#SOPHYGRAY is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. The artwork is fiscally sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts and supported by the Ministry of Culture North Rhine-Westphalia, and NEUSTART KULTUR by the German Federal Culture Commissioner, created in cooperation with the Max Planck Institute Berlin and sponsored by IT company Novatec, EPSON.
Image Credits:
Top: Nadja Verena Marcin in front of her installation #SOPHYGRAY, 2021, photo by Alexander Fichtner.
Middle: Installation image of #SOPHYGRAY in 2021, photo by Sebastian Drüen Art Fotografie.
Bottom: Opening reception of #SOPHYGRAY in 2021, video by Klaus Schwichtenberg.