Judders, Jabs, and Slips: Automation, Anomalies, Movements

In May 2019, the “Automation and Me” event invited digital artists from around the world to come together in an unused shopping center unit in the heart of Leeds, United Kingdom, to critically respond to and explore the themes of automation, embodiment, and identity. In this article, we draw on Tobias Matzner’s argument that what algorithms are and do “emerges in a complex interplay of social practices, material properties, discourses, mathematical abstractions, code” to think through the event. In so doing, we explore a number of complex interplays as they were felt and lived by all of us who participated in it. We reflect on the experiences during the workshops through the particular framework of automation and feminist new materialism to explore how AI technologies and the complex surveillance of the smart environment replicated, on the one hand, existing and oppressive prejudice and, on the other hand, worked to constantly recalibrate and manipulate the context that humans and nonhumans navigate.