Life in Pixels with Armond Towns & Ramon Amaro

Presented by Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society

Life in Pixels hosts an ongoing series of transdisciplinary conversations thinking about how we can make sense of, and live with, our computational social condition today. Considering sociocultural, aesthetic, politicoeconomic, environmental, racial, and historical registers of technology together, the series will bring together people who think and do technology beyond disciplinary boundaries. The events are all designed as an ongoing series of conversations between scholars and practitioners in Media Studies, Science and Technology Studies, History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, Critical Digital Studies, and Literary Cultural Studies.

Speakers:
Armond R. Towns is an associate professor in Communication and Media Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, ON. His book, On Black Media Philosophy (University of California Press, 2022) mobilizes questions from Black studies and cultural studies to excavate a new media philosophy. He is currently developing another project on the relationship between the history of communication and media studies and the history of Black studies, focusing specifically on the development of both fields in U.S. and Canada.

Dr. Ramon Amaro, Ph.D. is Lecturer in Art and Visual Cultures of the Global South at UCL (University College London) Department of History of Art. Dr. Amaro’s writing, artistic practice, and research investigate the role of race and racial hierarchy in machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms. His book, The Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being (Sternberg , 2022) is a contemplation on the abstruse nature of machine learning, mathematics, and the deep incursion of racial hierarchy. Dr. Amaro completed his Ph.D. in Philosophy at Goldsmiths, University of London while holding a Master’s degree in Sociological Research from the University of Essex (UK) and a BS.e. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

For more information visit the event website.