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Alternatives for the unbanked

Algorithmic Anxiety in Contemporary Art: A Kierkegaardian Inquiry into the Imaginary of Possibility

Over the past decade, a growing number of artists and critical practitioners have become engaged with algorithms. This artistic engagement has resulted in algorithmic theatre, bot art, and algorithmic media and performance art of various kinds that thematise the dissemination and deployment of algorithms in everyday life. Especially striking is the high volume of artistic engagements with facial recognition algorithms, trading algorithms and search engine algorithms over the past few years.The fact that these three types of algorithms have garnered more responses than other types of algorithms suggests that they form a popular subject of artistic critique. This critique addresses several significant, supra-individual anxieties of our decade: socio- political uncertainty and polarisation, the global economic crisis and cycles of recession, and the centralisation and corporatisation of access to online information. However, the constituents of these anxieties — which seem to be central to our experience of algorithmic culture — are rarely interrogated. They, therefore, merit closer attention.This book uses prominent artistic representations of facial recognition algorithms, trading algorithms, and search algorithms as the entry point into an exploration of the constituents of the anxieties braided around these algorithms. It proposes that the work of Søren Kierkegaard—one of the first theorists of anxiety—helps us to investigate and critically analyse the constituents of ‘algorithmic anxiety’.

Risk Management for Research Data about people. A general matrix to be used by data stewards and research supporters for the assessment of privacy risks with research data and determination of appropriate methods for risk management

This matrix is generic. It is a tool for data stewards or other research supporters to assist researchers in taking appropriate measures for the safe use and protection of data about people in scientific research. It is a template that you can adjust to the context of your own institution, faculty and / or department by taking into consideration your setting’s own policies, guidelines, infrastructure and technical solutions. In this way you can more effectively determine the appropriate technical and organizational measures to protect the data based on the context of the research and the risks associated with the data.

Mental long Covid and the techno-social unconsciousness

It’s late April 2022 in Bologna and we meet in Franco’s apartment. He shows me his collection of collages he produced in the Covid period, his art therapy to fight off depression. The paintings can be found here and there online, exhibited under the pseudonym Istubalz. We’ve come together to discuss his latest book, The Third Unconscious: The Psychosphere in the Viral Age (published in English by Verso, translated by Bifo himself into Italian). The message of this short book is simple: we urgently need to engage with the future of psychoanalysis. The discovery of the unconscious in the eighteenth and nineteenth century resulted in the founding of psychoanalysis as both a therapy and tool for cultural analysis. Later, of course, it became an industry. In response to the emphasis of its founding fathers on denial and sublimation, the second mode of the unconscious, associated with Lacan and even more so Deleuze and Guattari, stressed the element of production. For them, the unconscious is not a theater but a factory. Fifty years into this probing of the liberation of desire, Berardi proposes a new angle: a third unconscious that circles around an understanding of the social dimension of the mind, in a world that is no longer focused on growth and (schizo-)productivity but on extinction and degrowth. Berardi calls for the development of new critical concepts that can help us to understand today’s spectrum of emotional attention. We must practice “riding the dynamic of disaster,” which he calls an accurate description of “our mental condition during the current earthquake, which is also a heart-quake and a mind-quake.” The seamless transition from Covid into the war in Ukraine reinstates the collapse of the bio-info-psycho circuit under the weight of the “stack of crises” (my term), the succession of catastrophic events. There’s a deeply unsettling and often profoundly depressing inevitably lurking about this atmosphere of accumulating disaster: the all-too-real sense that life is on the brink of total collapse and imminent disaster.

Anonymization - reference card for researchers

Reference card for researchers on anonymization - in order to engage them with research supporters and privacy specialists in their research institutions to deal with research data about people and risk management in a proper way. Also a Dutch version available through www.lcrdm.nl

Exploring automatic text‑to‑sign translation in a healthcare setting

Communication between healthcare professionals and deaf patients has been particularly challenging during the COVID-19 pandemic. We have explored the possibility to automatically translate phrases that are frequently used in the diagnosis and treatment of hospital patients, in particular phrases related to COVID-19, from Dutch or English to Dutch Sign Language (NGT). The prototype system we developed displays translations either by means of pre-recorded videos featuring a deaf human signer (for a limited number of sentences) or by means of animations featuring a computer-generated signing avatar (for a larger, though still restricted number of sentences). We evaluated the comprehensibility of the signing avatar, as compared to the human signer. We found that, while individual signs are recognized correctly when signed by the avatar almost as frequently as when signed by a human, sentence comprehension rates and clarity scores for the avatar are substantially lower than for the human signer. We identify a number of concrete limitations of the JASigning avatar engine that underlies our system. Namely, the engine currently does not offer sufficient control over mouth shapes, the relative speed and intensity of signs in a sentence (prosody), and transitions between signs. These limitations need to be overcome in future work for the engine to become usable in practice.