Decolonizing the Machine: Race, Gender and Disability in Robots and Algorithmic Art

This paper calls attention to critical race theory, critical disability studies, decolonial theory and their relevance to the study of robotic art and performances that utilise algorithms and other forms of computation. Our purpose is to uncover the veiled links between racial, gendered, and ableist practices that inform theory and practice in media art and performance, and to combat the governing codes that construct – and continue to normalize – practices of dehumanizing exclusions. While robots and cyborgs have the potential to figure posthuman forms of subjectivation, in practice they often reinforce human-machine, self-other, or abled-disabled binaries and gloss over the racist and dehumanizing exclusions that uphold neoliberal forms of power and Western conceptions of the human. Our aim is that this track, and the papers and discussions that follow, will highlight mechanisms for meaningful intervention and instigate critical reflection within media art theory to make visible how artworks and technologies continue to encode colonial hierarchies.