Caroline Sinders “Feminist Data Set”

Soho20 Chelsea Gallery

[Image: Original image: By Draper Laboratory; restored by Adam Cuerden [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. Glitching done by Caroline Sinders.]

This event has ended.

SOHO20 presents a new project for the +/- Project Space: Feminist Data Set by Caroline Sinders.

Sinders will use SOHO20’s space as a site of development with regular workshops and discussions, in order to create a feminist data set and to illustrate how this data can be analyzed by an AI system. For the past five years, she has researched online harassment and protest inside of social networks, while using machine learning and ethnography as methods of research. Inspired by the work she did as a BuzzFeed/Eyebeam fellow, in which documented and catalogued alt-right hate speech, Feminist Data Set proposes an intersectional feminist antidote to the default usage of patriarchal language.

This project is largely based on the idea that to remove bias within machine learning, the ‘removal of bias’ itself has to be manifested into a ‘thing’ to teach or sway the algorithms. In the workshops held at the gallery, Sinders will start to define the parameters for feminist words, interactions, their definitions, their origins and, potentially, their creators. Sinders aims to initiate a standard for equity and equality, by centering collaboration in the creation of this data set. Ultimately existing as a source that can be applied to data and technology, it will also take shape as a living document and practical poetry, updating the current understanding of cyberfeminism.

In lieu of a static exhibition, Sinders fills the +/- Project Space with activity, conversation, and research, asking: can data collection itself function as an artwork? Can it act as a form of protest? The creation of a feminist data set within a historic feminist art space introduces the possibility of data collection as a feminist practice, blurring the lines between art making and activism, with the larger goal of producing a tool to intervene in larger civic and private networks.