Imagining Backwards Computer

An excerpt from a poster shows a worm like structure in a blue-to-rose gradient that stretches across, its long body intersecting at parts and diverging at others. Wavy computer interfaces of folders, terminals and windows float atop the structure in blue and rose transparencies. Letters across read: Collecting things and Processing your data.

This research project (2022-23) focused on a speculative computational object titled Imagining Backwards Computer and was activated through a series of imagination workshops in which computational steps were followed by participants in order to write up unwritten pasts.

The Imagining Backwards Computer engages AI (algorithmic instability / ancestral intelligence) to imagine backwards in time. Time itself is a thriving material with which we can engage to imagine otherwise hirstories. Hirstories are different from "his" stories and move away from cis-gendered assumptions of who's story is being told. This project breaks with algorithmic habits of aggregating and predicting from today‘s oppressions.

Pedagogies of Imagining Backwards

During workshops we engaged collections: sometimes collected objects from our everyday lives, other times archival materials. In processing these sources into data, we took appreciation as our method, and asked: What engagements with our trans* and disabled presents/elders and their/our artifacts that supported our/their lives might there be? And what descriptions of longing & connection serve trans* and disabled experiences and which ones don't?

Poster

A poster shows a worm like structure in a blue-to-rose gradient that stretches across the page, its long body intersecting at parts and diverging at others. Various wavy computer interfaces of folders, terminals and windows float atop the structure in blue and rose transparencies. Letters across read: Collecting things, Processing your data, letter of appreciation, imagining. On the lower end of the structure, there is an opening and the words 'Imagination for a different future' fall out of them.

Discourse

workshop: “SET! Scripted Emergent Togethernesses: Collecting our everyday lives towards trans* and disabled presents”, part of Feeling Machines with Control Shift, Bristol, UK + online

workshop: "The Imagining Backwards Computer", Workshop and Lecture Series by the Research Fellows of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Sandberg Instituut 2022/23, Amsterdam, NL

workshop: "Predicting Backwards. Generating Hirstories", at Any | One Day the Future Has Died. Impossible Possibilities of Artificial Intelligence, organized by Katrin Köppert, Nelly Y. Pinkrah, Francesca Schmidt und Pinar Tuzcu, Conference at HGB Leipzig, DE