Language: English (mozilla)
The panel will examine the humanness of technology, and how it first starts with us. The dialogue will explore voice & language and the ways in which both can feed into the technologies we create and alternatively how much technology can take away from both.
Location
This session will take place on the Main Stage, in the Zonzij Room
J. Bob Alotta is a veteran movement builder and nonprofit executive working at the intersection of technology and communities, and currently serving as Vice President, Global Programs at Mozilla Foundation. At Mozilla, Bob leads several ambitious initiatives to make the internet and artificial intelligence more trustworthy and equitable. These include the Mozilla Festival (MozFest), which convenes tens of thousands of technologists and activists each year. The Data Futures Lab, which reimagines new, better ways for data to be governed. The Responsible Computer Science Challenge, which is training a new generation of ethics-minded technologists. And more. Prior to Mozilla, Bob led the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, a foundation based in New York City that provides critical resources to LGBTQI+ organizations and individuals around the world.
Kosisochukwu Nnebe is a Nigerian-Canadian visual artist. Inspired by postcolonial theorists Frantz Fanon and Edouard Glissant, Nnebe’s practice is invested in unraveling the process of racialization and re-thinking the politics of Black visibility. Moving across installation and lens-based media, Nnebe creates works that shapeshift and transform to reveal a glimpse into new ways of seeing and understanding Blackness.
In their play with spatiality and coded visual lexicons, Nnebe’s works root themselves also in Black feminist standpoint theory to demonstrate how one’s positionality within society - as within space - dictates what is seen and unseen, thus engaging viewers on issues both personal and structural in ways that bring awareness to their own complicity. Undergirding Nnebe’s practice is a desire for reconnection and dreams of otherwise Black futurities anchored in non-Western epistemologies and ontologies and anti-colonial solidarities.
Ethel-Ruth Tawe (b. Yaoundé, Cameroon) is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, curator and creative strategist exploring memory and identity in Africa and its diaspora. She examines space and time-based technologies often from a surrealist lens. Her burgeoning curatorial practice took form in an inaugural exhibition titled 'African Ancient Futures', and continues to expand in a myriad of audiovisual experiments. Ethel is recipient of the Magnum Foundation 2022 Counter Histories Grant for her project 'Image Frequency Modulation'.