Lecture | Global Histories of Knowledge Seminar
Augmenting a Digital Nusantara: Re-generating Colonial Datasets in Technofeminist Art
- Date
- Friday 6 June 2025
- Time
- Serie
- Global Histories of Knowledge 2024 - 2025
- Address
-
Johan Huizinga
Doelensteeg 16
2311 VL Leiden - Room
- 2.60
Abstract
In the advent of the data turn and new digital imaging technologies, processes of image-making have shifted from the ‘age of mechanical reproduction’ to the image-as-data. Photographs are transformed into the image-as-data to become data objects that are fed into computational processes, augmenting new images and narratives. Analysing the works of artists, Juria Toramae and Priyageetha Dia, I discuss their technofeminist approaches of manipulating perception with failed fakes and glitches. Each artist engages distinct datasets: photographic documentation of non-human organisms in the terumbu (reefs) surrounding Singapore; and archival photographs of Tamil indentured labour on plantations in British Malaya. In their activation, they evoke interpolated and hybrid creatures that imagine new mythologies in the formation of a Digital Nusantara: as an augmented metaverse of a forgotten Malay world.
Speaker
Nurul Huda Rashid is a postdoctoral researcher with Project 0100: Towards an Anthropology of Everyday AI in Islam, at CADS, Leiden University. Her research examines the algorithmic visuality of Muslim women images on global search engines through conjunctures of visual culture, critical gender and race studies, and critical AI and data studies. Central to her work is the exploration of data representation in the Nusantara and in counterdata activations through digital feminist art and annotation as pedagogy in community-led workshops.
Please contact m.k.bin.khidzer@hum.leidenuniv.nl if you wish to attend virtually.