Techart Conference

Laura Forlano (Northeastern University, USA)

■ Abstract

This talk offers a performative reading of excerpts from a recent publication, “Living Intimately with Machines: Can AI be Disabled?”, which was published by ACM Interactions in January 2023. I ask the provocative question: How might the world be different if we understood both ourselves and our technologies to be disabled? Drawing on my own experience as a Disabled Cyborg, documented through a decade of autoethnographic observation about Type 1 diabetes, my “smart” insulin pump and sensor system, I discuss what it means to live with automation through themes of agency, labor and failure. 

Building on the work of feminist scholar Alison Kafer’s Feminist, Queer, Crip, I have developed the figure of the “disabled cyborg” in order to describe the ways in which both people as well as the technologies that they rely on might be understood to be disabled thereby highlighting the mutually entangled lives of humans and non-humans. For example, disabled people are deeply aware of the ways in which technological fixes, innovations and imagined futures around disability require incredibly intensive regimes labor, maintenance and repair.

As an example of the labor of caring for machines, I have excerpted a small amount of “alert & alarm” data that I collected in July 2019 alarms in order to better understand the patterns and illustrate the variety and frequency of these alerts. This presentation includes a performative reading of this data in order to communicate the experience of living with machines, and, in particular, the subjective experience of algorithmic error.

While the subject of the written work to date has been primarily to offer an account of what it means to live with these systems, this piece includes two examples of critical making projects that point to the generative possibility of using art and design to create knowledge about machines.

■ Bio

Laura Forlano, a Fulbright award-winning and National Science Foundation funded scholar, is a disabled writer, social scientist and design researcher. She is Professor in the departments of Art + Design and Communication Studies in the College of Arts, Media, and Design and Distinguished Senior Fellow at The Burnes Center for Social Change at Northeastern University. Forlano is also an Affiliated Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. She received her Ph.D. in communications from Columbia University.