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EVENT DETAILS |
This event is part of the Technology & Consciousness Series:Fall/Winter 2018-2019
Memes are the street art of our digital spaces & increasingly serve to reinforce, amplify, & shape today's politics.
The silly stuff of meme culture-the photo remixes, the selfies, the YouTube songs, & the pun-tastic hashtags-are fundamentally intertwined with how we find & affirm one another, direct attention to human rights & social justice issues, build narratives, & make culture. Meanwhile, governments are learning to wield the internet as effectively as protestors, & hate groups are also beginning to utilize memes to spread propaganda, xenophobia, & misinformation. Botnets & state-sponsored agents spread them to confuse & distract internet communities. Whether we like it or not, memes have become a major part of life on & offline. Join writer & curator Dorothy R. Santos for a conversation with technologist & digital media scholar An Xiao Mina exploring the long, winding road from the innocuous cat photos of the past to the central practice for political contention & civic engagement that memes have become today.
An Xiao Mina is a technologist, writer, & artist. She leads the product team at Meedan, where they are building Check, a platform for collaboratively verifying news in real time, & Bridge, a platform for translating social media & messaging app content. She is also a co-founder at the Credibility Coalition, an effort to develop a standard for assessing content credibility online, & co-chair of the W3C Credible Web Community Group.
At Harvard University, An is an affiliate researcher at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society & a recent 2016 Knight Visiting Fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, where she studied online language barriers & their impact on journalism.
She is also co-founder of The Civic Beat, a global research collective focused on the creative side of civic technology. They have led workshops & exhibitions in spaces such as the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Mozilla Festival Open Artist Studio (curated by the V&A Museum & Tate Modern), the Asian Art Museum, the Museum of the Moving Image, the ACLU & RightsCon, & they've been producing what Net Monitor called "the cutest map of the internet"-a world map of animal memes in collaboration with over a dozen internet culture researchers. She serves as contributing editor to Civicist, advisory editor to Hyperallergic, board member at China Residencies, & co-chair at the Online News Association's SF Bay Area chapter.
An is the author of Memes to Movements: How the World's Most Viral Media is Changing Social Protest & Power.
Dorothy R. Santosis a Filipina American writer, curator, & researcher whose academic interests include digital art, computational media, & biotechnology. Born & raised in San Francisco, California, she holds Bachelor's degrees in Philosophy & Psychology from the University of San Francisco & received her Master's degree in Visual & Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts. She is currently a PhD student in Film & Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellow.
Her work appears inart21,Art Practical,Rhizome,Hyperallergic,Ars Technica,Vice Motherboard, & SF MOMA'sOpen Space. Her essay "Materiality to Machines: Manufacturing the Organic & Hypotheses for Future Imaginings," was published in The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art & Architecture. She serves as a co-curator for REFRESH , a curatorial collective in partnership with Eyebeam, the program manager for the Processing Foundation, & host for the podcast PRNT SCRN produced byArt Practical.
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