gallery & incubator for the next generation of digital creators :)
based in oakland
What Do We Want Our Machines to Remember?
Join digital ethicists Tess Buckley and Caitlin Morris for a participatory workshop combining critical discussion, an offline small language model and a collective sewing project. Rather than treating AI as something inevitable or beyond our control, we’ll ask how communities can understand, govern, reshape or refuse the technologies entering their lives :)
➰ Start with what we know
A favourite food spot, a good hike, something someone taught you. What makes knowledge worth sharing? What should remain private? Together, we’ll explore an offline small language model built from knowledge contributed by the group and consider how a system might redirect people toward human-to-human exchange.
We’ll compare offline and online models, small and large systems, and different forms of ownership and control. The goal is not to endorse LLMs. It is to give people more language, knowledge and agency for deciding how, when or whether they should be used.
➰ Decide the rules together
What should a community-held system contain? Who gets to contribute? Who governs it? What should it refuse to hold?
Through informal collective governance, participants will decide the rules of a shared model. Skepticism and disagreement are welcome. You do not need to be “pro-AI” to participate in shaping the conversation around it.
➰ Stitch a shared memory
Using conductive thread, LEDs & diodes, each person will sew a word into a page of a shared physical “book.”
The pages form a hand-sewn diode-matrix read-only memory, based on the same principle early computers used to permanently hard-wire information. Each word is encoded using Baudot code and read by a microcontroller. When the translucent pages are bound together, their lights overlap into new and unexpected compositions.
This collective object makes computer memory something we can touch, build and question together.
➰ Reimagine who gets to be technical
What changes when computing looks like a sewing circle? The workshop also asks who gets to count as a designer or engineer, how practices associated with women’s labour have been excluded from technical histories, and what other forms technology could take when more people have the power to shape it.
Bring your curiosity, questions & disagreements.
Date: Sunday, September 13
Time: 10:00 AM–12:00 PM
Location: The MADE, Oakland
gallery & incubator for the next generation of digital creators :)
based in oakland