Events

CHAIRPERSON

Assoc Prof Jiat Hwee Chang, Asia Research Institute, and Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

The US-China AI arms race is frequently framed in the West with a techno-Orientalist narrative that attributes China’s advantage to its access to massive datasets acquired from an acquiescent horde (subsequent to Edward Said’s canonical 1978 work, scholars of techno-Orientalism like Roh et al, 2015, have thought generatively about how Asia is imagined in technological terms, and about how technology is racialized). Beyond cybersecurity fears and trade tensions, these discourses arise from sectarian domestic efforts to undermine regulation of the technology industry. This war of position, waged by an alliance of techno-libertarian precincts in Silicon Valley with anti-tax lobbyists, uses “China” as a cudgel to ward off privacy protections and antitrust enforcement. This presentation highlights films such as In the Age of AI (2019) and Coded Bias (2020) as highly influential and expressive purveyors of this rhetoric. Most notably, the techno-Orientalist fantasies that they project also transcend ideological divides, for even Coded Bias, a vociferous oppositional work born of the “techlash,” recapitulates the same story with the usual creative palette. Due to the unremitting need to raise algorithmic literacy, and indeed because these films do make valuable critical interventions, it is vital to understand the grammar with which AI is presented and critiqued.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Gerald Sim is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Florida Atlantic University (FAU). He is the author of The Subject of Film and Race: Retheorizing Politics, Ideology, and Cinema (Bloomsbury Academic 2014) and Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability (Amsterdam UP, 2020), and essays in Television and New Media, Convergence, Positions, Discourse, Rethinking Marxism, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Projections, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Film Quarterly, Asian Cinema, and other venues. They include recent articles on digital microgenres, data-platonism in Moneyball, and Netflix’s place in media history. This presentation draws from research related to his current monograph, a technopolitical study of films that shape our algorithmic literacy. He was Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute in 2013 and 2016.

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed. Please write to aritm@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the talk.