Edited Project
special forum on automation
This forum invited the contributors to think broadly in form, medium, and concept about automation and its imaginaries, including (but certainly not limited to) the often grandiose promises of automation’s capacities and depictions of robots and automata. What does automation generate, amplify, make visible? And what or who does automation obscure or put under erasure? What forms, mediums, concepts, or figures might we employ to engage automation in all its complexities?
Meanwhile, other aspects of automated technologies are largely obscured, unmentioned in these promises—from the catastrophic environmental costs of digital devices that are disproportionately borne by communities in the Global South, to the extensive erasures of human labor and human bias that enable automation while at the same time perpetuating existing relations of power, oppression, and dispossession.
