This month we have two exciting talks by our Postdoc Dr. Nurul Huda Rashid
6 June 2025 – Leiden University |16:00-17:00 | Huizinga Room 2.60
Talk at the Global Histories of Knowledge Seminar Series at Institute of History
“Augmenting a Digital Nusantara: Re-generating Colonial Datasets in Technofeminist Art”
In the advent of the data turn and new digital imaging technologies, processes of image-making have shifted from the ‘age of mechanical reproduction’ to the image-as-data. Photographs are transformed into the image-as-data to become data objects that are fed into computational processes, augmenting new images and narratives. Analysing the works of artists, Juria Toramae and Priyageetha Dia, I discuss their technofeminist approaches of manipulating perception with failed fakes and glitches. Each artist engages distinct datasets: photographic documentation of non-human organisms in the terumbu (reefs) surrounding Singapore; and archival photographs of Tamil indentured labour on plantations in British Malaya. In their activation, they evoke interpolated and hybrid creatures that imagine new mythologies in the formation of a Digital Nusantara: as an augmented metaverse of a forgotten Malay world.
Event details here
19th June – KITLV | SEA Seminar – Leiden University | 15:30 – 17:00
“An Algorithmic Visuality of Muslim Women Images”
From the Women of Algiers (1834) painting, postcards of the odalisque, to the photograph of the Afghan Girl (1984), representations of Muslim women have been pervasively captured in various image forms across time. Plotted across the 19th to 21st centuries, different technologies have contributed to the exponential reproduction and circulation of Muslim women images, evoking a visuality that highlights intersections of technology, ideology, and geography. In the data turn, a new algorithmic visuality is introduced, yielding new formulations to old paradigms. I theorise algorithmic visuality through an analysis of the circulation and correlation of Muslim women images on global search engines, highlighting the discriminatory characteristics of automation. This is challenged through augmentation, explored in activations by digital feminist artists and the articulation of a digital Nusantara. Annotation is subsequently introduced as a pedagogical tool of bringing back the bodies to big data through a participatory action research workshop with self-identified Muslim women in Singapore. Through annotation, augmentation, and annotation, I introduce research designs as resources and strategies of studying the image-as-data, AI art, and data representation. These contribute toward curriculums that seek to destabilise imperial technologies and challenge colonial subjectivities.
Event details: https://www.kitlv.nl/event/rashid/
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