Workshop #4: “Understandings of Uncertainty: Everyday data and algorithmic literacies” 21st, October 2021
Uncertainty is seen as a negative word, It should not. Uncertainty cannot be fully contained nor regulated. Dynamic engagements that take on everyday life unfold in an unpredictable way. Moreover, as humans we shift in moods, aims, and levels of intimacy, without intentionally seeking these changes. Human creativity is marked by imagination and thinking of things that were not thought of before. Creative innovations that have come to define and revolutionize the world, from music to medicine, are often marked by surprise, spontaneity, and uncertainty. Creativity, by definition, defies expectation.
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This workshop aims to foster collaborations between people across multiple disciplines through a set of central questions and techniques for exploring our notions on uncertainty.
The focus on uncertainty helps to bring to the public sphere new questions that are often not taken up by narrowly defined, official, expert-driven discourses. We seek to mobilise understandings of uncertainty, and explore how capabilities associated with negotiating uncertainty, plurality, and incompleteness are associated with the anticipatory materialising practices of data and algorithms.
During the workshop we encourage you to explore, experiment and discover. To iterate through different platforms and to practice and build your own skill-set.
Our research workshop, “Understandings of Uncertainty,” is animated by the point that everyone, just like those who study them academically and professionally, is interested in how algorithms shape our world, and how they have been positioned as a determinant for decision making. In this proposal, we provide an outline of our workshop to understand how audiences conceive uncertainty, a term politically inflected and socially produced that is constantly present when dealing with data, archives, algorithms and the quest for understanding past, present and futures.
Workshop Aims
Our research workshop, “Understandings of Uncertainty,” is animated by the point that everyone is interested in how algorithms shape our world, and how they have been positioned as a determinant for decision making. In this proposal, we provide an outline of our workshop to understand how audiences conceive uncertainty, a term politically inflected and socially produced that is constantly present when dealing with data, archives, algorithms and the quest for understanding past, present and futures.
The design of our workshop is informed by both of our research, which acknowledges that notions of uncertainty go beyond the binaries. The production of uncertainties is shaped by culture, sensory and bodily knowledge.
Such stories get dismissed as part animism, part superstition, and part ignorance, but what if they are about alternative imaginaries?
As part of our ongoing work within the PROVIDEDH | CHIST-ERA project, we are committed to implementing participatory practices within broad community schemes in which people engage and reflect on the presence of uncertainty, and its understandings, in a world where data and its different visualizations are present in different forms. This workshop carefully looks through open-innovation practices that are accessible for people no matter their background.
At the core of the project’s vision, we explore in a unique approach, aligned with the Austrian Open Innovation Strategy, how Open Innovation methods and practices and art-driven innovation may support reaching the Agenda 2030.
Partners: PROVIDEDH | CHIST-ERA. Algorithm Inventarium, Harvard Metalab, ACDH-CH
