Artificial Access, Access as Artifice:

Please join Dr. Lior Zalmanson and Chancey Fleet in conversation about how the tech industry frames AI as a means to "solve" access to sounds and images by Blind, Deaf and disabled people. How welcomed, effective and versatile are AI interpretations? What purposes (other than access) are served by their deployment and public promotion? Do they deepen and excite public engagement with the project of digital accessibility as justice, or do they offer permission to disengage?

Dr. Zalmanson will discuss two recent works "Excess Ability" and "image may contain" that will be part of an upcoming exhibition at the New School named "The Question of intelligence: AI and the future of Humanity" curated by Christiane Paul. The works challenge Silicon valley's "solution-ism" approach regarding the topic of website accessibility. In his practice, Lior hacks or reverse-engineers the machine learning algorithms, intended to make the web more accessible, to expose how they might, in reality, create adverse effects.

Dr. Lior Zalmanson is an artist, curator and a senior lecturer at the Technology and Information Management Program, Coller School of Management, Tel Aviv University

His research interests include online behaviour in virtual environments and the intersection between online content, community practices and the governance of machine learning algorithms. His research has won awards and grants from Fulbright Foundation, Dan David Prize, Google, Marketing Science Institute, Social Informatics SIG, among others. His studies were covered in The Times, NY Post, Independent, PBS, Fast Company including numerous mentions in the Israeli media.

As an artist he has exhibited works on AI, accessibility, online labour and the future of man-machine communication. In 2016 he was appointed as a research fellow at the Metropolitan Museum Media Lab. Lior is also the founder of the Print Screen Festival, Israel's digital culture festival, which connects internet researchers, activists, and artists.

Chancey Fleet is a 2018-19 Data & Society Fellow and current Affiliate-in-Residence whose writing, organizing and advocacy aims to catalyze critical inquiry into how cloud-connected accessibility tools benefit and harm, empower and expose communities of disability. Chancey is the Assistive Technology Coordinator at the New York Public Library where she founded and maintains the Dimensions Project, a free open lab for the exploration and creation of accessible images, models and data representations through tactile graphics, 3d models and nonvisual approaches to coding, CAD and "visual" arts. Chancey was recognized as a 2017 Library Journal Mover and Shaker.

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Network Talk: Artificial Access, Access as Artifice with Lior Zalmanson and Chancey Fleet