[Petit Fours #433] On emotional encounters, women's health research, and interdisciplinary artwork
Hi, all! Here’s what I’ve got for you as we launch into this final week of May:
#1 In just over a week, on June 4, our focus period is hosting a FemTech + Feminist Tech Exhibition, curated by Nadia Campo Woytuk: “The FemTech + Feminist Tech Exhibition brings together interdisciplinary artworks that critically engage with intimate health, data, and care from feminist and decolonial perspectives. Spanning media such as watercolor, cyanotype, wearable tech, AI, soft robotics, and sound, the exhibition puts FemTech (the industry's term for technologies for the "female" body) and Feminist Tech (a feminist perspective of technology) in conversation with one another. The artworks collectivley explore themes of intimate health, the vaginal microbiome, fertility tracking, and menstrual care, alongside broader investigations into consent, climate crisis, synthetic voice, and data ethics. Emphasizing open science, embodied approaches to data, and invisible labor, the works interrogate extractive and dominant technologies while proposing alternative, relational modes of designing with and for the body and the ecologies around us. The evening will feature performances, interactive art and mingling with researchers and artists.“ The event is open to the public and free of charge. If you’d like to join, sign up quickly to secure your spot!
#2 How That Robot Made Me Feel, a new collection edited by Ericka Johnson, is now available open access: “Do robots, or the AI that is driving them, have emotions? That is a hotly debated topic—both in science fiction, where such assertions are a staple of the narrative, and in tech development, where it often makes headlines. But what about how we humans emotionally respond to robots? Are our emotional responses any less important when it comes to how the robots we encounter today are designed? In How That Robot Made Me Feel, Ericka Johnson asks the authors in this collection to critically examine our emotional and affective responses to robots, and what such an examination would do to the way roboticists use (or toy with) our emotions in their design decisions.“
#3 Adjacent to our focus period’s interests, here’s a white paper on what is needed to advance women’s health research: Prescription for Change: Policy Recommendations for Women’s Health Research.
#4 The AI Warnings Will Continue Until Morale Improves, a column by John Herrman is worth a read for the analysis and reflections it offers: “To the extent this era of layoffs can be connected with AI, it’s through the combination of higher interest rates and a sense of urgency about massive up-front investment in AI, not its early deployment.”
-A