Community

From Intersectional AI Toolkit

Land Acknowledgment[edit]

This work offers respect and gratitude to the Tongva and Chumash peoples, who are the rightful and traditional caretakers of the land where large portions of this work have been created, along with many other sites. If you have contributed to this project from another location, you are invited to add your own land acknowledgment and visit Native-Land.ca to learn about the history of where you live, why this matters, and how to contribute.

Community Values[edit]

"Care is the practice of savouring how subtle differences can make all the difference." –Data Loam[1]

a guide for gathering here[edit]

  • scrappy artistic strategies, not perfect code[^ccc] #nocodesnobs[^p5]
  • growth, not perfection[^ccc] #newKidLove[^p5]
  • collaboration, not competition[^ccc]
  • we all have skills to teach each other[^ccc]
  • meet people where they are. don't assume knowledge or imply hierarchies of skills. we are not snobs about coding, scholarship, or other forms of knowledge.[^p5]
  • value processes as much as, or more than, outcomes[^amb]
  • all theory and practice is theory–practice.[^ccc] interdisciplinary goes hand-in-hand with intersectionality[^ccc]
  • #blacklivesmatter #translivesmatter #indigenouslivesmatter we engage tension; don't indulge drama[^amb]
  • focus on strategies rather than issues, solutions rather than problems[^AMC]
  • listen from the heart, speak from the heart, be spontaneous, be brief[^Council]
  • assume best intent and attend to impact[^amb]
  • attempt collaboration before conflict[^superrr]
  • we accept responsibility for our actions and take care to make amends when we are wrong[^p5]
  • we take the lessons, leave the details (confidentiality)[^amb]
  • we center care[^AMC]—self care and community care[^amb]

These guidelines are open to inputs and updates as necessary to support the needs of this space and community as they evolve.

Thank you to the individuals and organizations who developed these principles and protocols: adrienne maree brown,[^amb] Allied Media Conference,[^AMC] Berlin Code of Conduct,[^BerlinCoC] Center for Council,[^Council] P5.js,[^p5] Superrr,[^superrr] W3C,[^W3C] and Creative Code Collective.[^ccc]

[^amb]: brown, a.m. (2017). Emergent Strategies. AK Press. Visit adrienne maree brown [^AMC]: Allied Media Conference [^BerlinCoC]: Berlin Code of Conduct [^Council]: Center for Council [^ccc]: Creative Code Collective [^p5]: p5js [^W3C]: [^superrr]: Superrr

data & privacy[edit]

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Imprint[edit]

Individual contributors[edit]

Have you made updates to the IAI Toolkit? Please do add your name here and link to your site. We'd love for everyone to get to know you!

  • Nora Al-Badri, edit-a-thon panelist
  • Hadi Asghari, edit-a-thon participant
  • Anna & Agnieszka & Kian, zine workshop participants
  • Tiffany Conroy, edit-a-thon participant
  • Daniela Dicks, edit-a-thon co-organizer
  • Christina Dinar, edit-a-thon participant and mentor
  • Ariana Dongus, edit-a-thon panelist
  • Miriam Fahimi, edit-a-thon participant
  • Katrin Fritsch, edit-a-thon mentor and participant
  • Geraldine, zine workshop participant
  • Julie Gough, Illustrated Women in History, portrait drawing
  • Johanna Hedva, edit-a-thon speaker
  • Freya Hewett, edit-a-thon participant
  • Friederike Kaltheuner, edit-a-thon participant
  • John Lee, zine workshop participant
  • Julia Kloiber, edit-a-thon participant and mentor
  • Julian Klusmann-Rösner, edit-a-thon participant
  • Lucas LaRochelle, edit-a-thon participant
  • Laura Liebig, edit-a-thon participant
  • Siri Lee Lindskrog, zine workshop participant
  • evelyn masso, zine workshop participant
  • Emily Martinez, zine workshops participant
  • Miguel Mercado, zine workshop participant
  • Leigh Montavon, hand-lettering
  • Eeva Moore, zine workshop participant
  • Katharina Mosene, edit-a-thon participant and mentor
  • Adriaan Odendaal, edit-a-thon panelist, workshop participant
  • Jason Perez, edit-a-thon participant
  • Carolina Reis, edit-a-thon participant
  • Julia Schneider Gaskin, zine workshop participant
  • Mary Anne Smart, workshop participant
  • Jakob Stolberg-Larsen, edit-a-thon participant
  • Aleksandra Straczek, zine workshop participant
  • Hanna Völkle, edit-a-thon participant and mentor
  • Helene von Schwichow, edit-a-thon participant and mentor
  • Johanna Wallenborn, edit-a-thon organizing support
  • Philipp Weitzel, edit-a-thon organizing support
  • Katrin Werner, edit-a-thon participant and mentor
  • Jessica Wulf, edit-a-thon participant
  • Nushin Yazdani, edit-a-thon participant
  • Karla Zavala Barreda, edit-a-thon panelist, workshop participant
  • Theresa Züger, edit-a-thon participant
  • Theresa Henne, edit-a-thon participant
  • Katherine Yang, zine workshop participantand magnificent css support

Institutional support[edit]

  • Akademie der Künste JUNGE Akademie, AI Anarchies fellowship 2022
  • Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, virtual fellowship, 2021; associated researcher 2022
  • Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, USC Humanities in a Digital World Program, PhD fellowship, 2021–2023
  • USC Media Arts + Practice Division, School of Cinematic Arts, PhD fellowship 2017-2022
  • with additional thanks to MOTIF, netzforma*, and SUPERRR

Project origins[edit]

This toolkit includes the collaboration and support of oh-so-many, and it is a research project started by me, Sarah Ciston (they&she).

I'm a poet-programmer who loves building community through creative-critical code. Currently, I'm a PhD Candidate at USC's Media Arts and Practice division and a Mellon Fellow in Digital Humanities. I'm also an Associated Researcher at the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society in Berlin and recently a Google Season of Docs Mentor with Processing Foundation's P5.js. My research investigates how to bring intersectionality to artificial intelligence by employing queer, anti-racist, anti-ableist, and feminist theories, ethics, and tactics. I also lead Creative Code Collective—a student community for co-learning programming using approachable, interdisciplinary strategies. My creative-critical code-writing projects include an interactive poem of the quantified self and a chatbot that tries to explain feminism to online misogynists. I did my MFA in Literature from UC San Diego and was once named one of San Francisco Weekly's "Best Writers Without a Book." I am white, queer, and from the Ozarks, which is the ancestral home of the Osage and Kickapoo Nations. My favorite word is "we."

In Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed outlines "A Killjoy Survival Kit," which she says should contain books, things, tools, time, life, permission notes, other killjoys, humor, feelings, bodies, and your own survival kit (235–249).[2] The Intersectional AI Toolkit is inspired by the kind of cooperative survival she calls for:
"Protest can be a form of self-care as well as care for others: a refusal not to matter. Self-care can also be those ordinary ways we look out for each other [...] in queer, feminist, and antiracist work, self-care is about the creation of community, fragile communities [...] assembled out of the experiences of being shattered. We reassemble ourselves through the ordinary, everyday, and often painstaking work of looking after ourselves; looking after each other." (240)[2]
Furthermore, the toolkit I sketch out here is something I want in my own survival kit, and something I hope others will want in theirs, too.

Contact[edit]

For additional input on the project or media inquiries, write to me at ciston@usc.edu. You can also reach me on most of the platforms @sarahciston 💜

Events[edit]

19 Aug 2023International Summer Academy for Fine Arts Salzburg
16 Aug 2023Chaos Communication Camp
1 Jun-9 Jul 2023Broken Machines and Wild Imaginings Exhibition, Akademie der Künste
23 Mar 2023Mozilla Festival 2023: Unsupervised Pleasures with Emily Martinez
27 Jan 2023transmediale vorspiel our data bodies workshop
17 Oct 2022AI Anarchies Autumn School
21 Jul 2022ZK/U Open Haus
11 Jun 2022re:publica 22 .txt
08 Jun 2022re:publica 22
29 Apr 2022Coding Care Zine Lab imappening 2022, USC
8 Mar 2022Mozilla Festival: Making Zines, Remaking Machines
14 Nov 2021Creative Code Collective Zine-Making Workshop, USC
13-18 Sep 2021POM Berlin
1 Sep 2021HIIG Edit-A-Thon
30 Aug 2021MUTEK Forum, Montreal
26 Aug 2021CARPA7 Uniarts Helsinki

Panel discussion from first IAI Edit-a-thon[edit]


  1. Data Loam. 2020. In J. Golding, M. Reinhart, & M. Paganelli (Eds.) De Gruyter. pg 380.
  2. 2.0 2.1 Template:Living a Feminist Life