Journey Towards Anti-Racism Ep6: Conversation with Sydney Skybetter (EP.59)
Updated
April 4, 2022
In episode six of the 12-part podcast series, "White Men & the Journey Towards Anti-Racism," Tim interviews Sydney Skybetter choreographer and founder of the Center for Research on Choreographic Interfaces that convenes experts in dance, performance, computer science, kinesiology, anthropology, social justice, and design to explore the relationship between bodies, movement, and emerging technologies.
This series was created to be a resource for white men who might be wrestling with questions like, “What’s my role in anti-racism, equity, inclusion, and justice work as a white man with power and privilege?” and “How might my personal commitment to do this work manifest itself in the organization I help lead?”
Are you new to the series? Check out episode 54 where podcast co-hosts Lauren Ruffin and Tim Cynova introduce and frame the conversations. Download the accompanying study guide. And explore the other episodes in this series with guests:
Raphael Bemporad (Founding Partner) & Bryan Miller (Chief Financial Officer), BBMG
Ron Carucci, Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Navalent
Ted Castle (Founder & President) & Rooney Castle (Vice President), Rhino Foods
David Devan, General Director & President, Opera Philadelphia
Jared Fishman, Founding Executive Director, Justice Innovation Lab
Jay Coen Gilbert, Co-Founder, B Lab; CEO, Imperative21
Kit Hughes, Co-Founder & CEO, Look Listen
Marc Mannella, Independent Consultant, Former CEO KIPP Philadelphia Public Schools
John Orr, Executive Director, Art-Reach
David Reuter, Partner, LLR
Want to explore related resources primarily *not* by white guys? Check out our compilation of 30 books, podcasts, and films. Read “Reflections From a Token Black Friend,” mentioned in this episode.
Host: Tim Cynova
Guest
SYDNEY SKYBETTER is a choreographer. Hailed by the Financial Times as “One of the world’s foremost thinkers on the intersection of dance and emerging technologies,” Sydney’s choreography has been performed at such venues as The Kennedy Center, Jacob’s Pillow and The Joyce Theater. A sought-after speaker, he has lectured at SXSW, Yale, Mozilla, and Stanford, and consulted for The National Ballet of Canada, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Hasbro, New York University and The University of Southern California, among others. He is a Public Humanities Fellow, Senior Lecturer and the Associate Chair of Theatre Arts & Performance Studies at Brown University, and an affiliate of metaLAB at Harvard University and Dark Laboratory at Cornell University. He is a regular contributor to WIRED and Dance Magazine, has served as a Grant Panelist for the National Endowment of the Arts, is a founding member of the Guild of Future Architects, and is the Founder of the Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces.
Host
TIM CYNOVA (he/him) is the Principal of Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., an HR and org design consultancy helping to reimagine workplaces where everyone can thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and a trained mediator, and has served on the faculty of Minneapolis College of Art & Design, the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Banff, Canada) and The New School (New York City) teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design and Strategic HR. In 2021, he concluded a 12-year tenure leading Fractured Atlas, a $30M, entirely virtual non-profit technology company and the largest association of independent artists in the U.S., where he served in both the Chief Operating Officer and Co-CEO roles (part of a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team), and was deeply involved in its work to become an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization since they made that commitment in 2013. Earlier in his career, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts in New York City, had a memorable stint with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, was a one-time classical trombonist, musicologist, and for five years in his youth he delivered newspapers for the Evansville, Indiana Courier-Press.
Transcript
Sydney Skybetter:
The privilege that I occupy is in relation to hegemonic violence everywhere. So, the pervasiveness and subtlety of hegemony, it's like The Matrix. It's everywhere. Maybe to borrow a little bit from the Wachowski siblings and a little bit from Kimberley Crenshaw, we're all in a prison that for many of us, we can neither feel, nor taste, nor touch. It's everywhere.
Sydney Skybetter:
But this means that the work of resistance has to be equally ubiquitous. It means that from making decisions about how I structure my payroll, to how I parent my children, I need to always, always be looking for ways to learn and to do the work. It's all the work. And if that sounds exhausting to the other white folks listening in today, imagine what it's like for the folks for whom prison isn't a metaphor, the folks for whom the very notion of America was constructed to subjugate.
Sydney Skybetter:
I choose to engage in this work because I was afforded the choice, and also because choosing not to make a choice is a choice too.
Tim Cynova:
Hi, I'm Tim Cynova, and welcome to Work Shouldn't Suck, a podcast about, well, that.
Tim Cynova:
We've paused our regular podcast episodes to produce this 10 part mini-series called White Men and the Journey Towards Anti-Racism.
Tim Cynova:
While you can listen to the episodes in any order, if you're joining us in the midst of this adventure, I invite you to check out episode 54 of our podcast where my co-host Lauren Ruffin and I introduced the series and frame these conversations.
Tim Cynova:
All of the episodes, as well as a whole host of amazing resources on the topic, not by white guys, can be found on workshouldntsuck.co.
Tim Cynova:
In this series, we're talking with the variety of white guys who are personally and professionally engaged in anti-racism work. When asked, they each define their work in slightly different ways. Some articulate it as anti-racism or anti-oppression work, others say they approach it more through a justice lens, others, inclusion and belonging, still others, equity and impact.
Tim Cynova:
Through were these conversations, we'll explore the moments that led each of them to do this work, including their initial realizations that this was work for white guys to be doing. We'll discuss what's been most impactful and resonant to them in the journey, what's been most challenging, and since this is a podcast about the workplace, we'll discuss how this work shows up in the organizations they lead and the ones they work with.
Tim Cynova:
On today's conversation, I'm joined by Sydney Skybetter, someone who wears a multitude of hats, which you could read more about in his bio that's included in the episode description.
Tim Cynova:
One thing conspicuously absent I noticed is his stint as a famed co-host of the popular-ish online TV show, Sky Nova. Perhaps if time allows, we'll dig into that. So let's get going.
Tim Cynova:
Sydney, welcome to the podcast.
Sydney Skybetter:
Thank you, Tim. It's a pleasure to be here. Though quick note to Bennet, I'm not sure we were ever popular.
Tim Cynova:
I said popular-ish.
Sydney Skybetter:
Oh, I see. I was going to say your mom may differ on that opinion, but anyway, a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
Tim Cynova:
Sydney, you wear a multitude of hats. And even though I've known you for more than a decade, I lose track of which ones you're wearing when from time to time. So how do you typically introduce yourself these days and the work that you do?
Sydney Skybetter:
After being in industry for 20 years, I have finally consolidated my hats to just one. I introduce myself now as a choreographer. I, as you mentioned, have had a number of different professional ventures or interfaces. I've done everything from web design to...
Sydney Skybetter:
Actually speaking of hats, I was a Ukrainian hat salesman for a while there. That was in the early 2000s. That was the first time I got fired. I digress.
Sydney Skybetter:
I introduce myself as a choreographer because I'm interested in bodies and how bodies move through space and time, and most recently, how bodies move in relation to computational systems ranging from robotics to virtual reality and artificial intelligences.
Sydney Skybetter:
I'm a professor here at Brown University and the founder of a center for research on choreographic interfaces.
Tim Cynova:
That's cool. What is the center going to be focused on?
Sydney Skybetter:
So for the last seven years, we have produced a convening here at Brown called The Conference for Research On Choreographic Interfaces or CRCI named for the home necromancer witch whose story reminds us, among other things, of the dangers of technologies that are indistinguishable from magic.
Sydney Skybetter:
Functionally, this convening has been all about the creative possibilities and perils of when bodies meet emerging computational systems ranging from the quotidian. From our watches and phones and computers to the more advanced and militaristic, ranging from military robots and drones to surveillance apparatus at the TSA. Wherever bodies run into these computational systems, there are possibilities and no small amount of risks and this conference and now center exists to study these and intervene where possible.
Tim Cynova:
Fascinating, Sydney.
Tim Cynova:
We've talked with a lot of people in this podcast mini series who define the work that they do differently. Anti-racism, anti-oppression, diversity, equity, inclusion, justice. I'm really curious too, with the work that you're doing with center, how do you define and categorize the lenses that you view your work and especially through some pretty problematic stuff that's developing around AI and robotics and how those systems are especially oppressive of non-white guys.
Sydney Skybetter:
Yeah. That's a deep stack. I think the term I center on most frequently of the litany you just mentioned is justice and consideration of designing towards justice.
Sydney Skybetter:
I'm involved in a lot of conversations that pertain to the design and implementation of a lot of these emerging technologies. We work with a lot of technologists, engineers and designers who are in the room making and building, and testing these things. And because of this, I'm particularly interested in and site frequently the work of Sasha Castanza-Chock, Design Justice. This is a phenomenal book and critique that distinguishes, among other things, between designing for good and designing towards justice.
Sydney Skybetter:
If you imagine IDO or OXO, or any number of these design agencies that pretend or pretend to design towards universality, universal design is a mantra that is pretty popular and has been for the last decade or so. But Castanza-Chock points out that the idea of universal design is a mythology. It's impossible. Even if you have like a slightly wider carrot peeler or whatever, you are still designing towards certain kinds of affordances and creating dis-affordances for others.
Sydney Skybetter:
And so this question of universality is first completely dismissed. We are always, when designing or engineering something, creating affordances for some and dis-affordances for others.
Sydney Skybetter:
This is a way of dismantling the question of designing towards good or working towards good, but introduces a more complex question of, what does it mean to design towards justice? What does it mean to create design processes that at are oriented towards an intersectional approach, that acknowledge hegemonic violence, that acknowledge ecological justice and climate change, that acknowledge the asymmetries in the corporal risks pertaining to the emergence of these technologies? This allows us to reconceive of design culture in a really radical way that this is still a practice, by the way. We're still working on figuring out how to do this, but there are growing communities of practice that are committed to this work, and the CRCI Center is in good company here.
Sydney Skybetter:
The other further complication, when thinking about designing towards justice or emerging technologies that pertain towards questions of justice, we're working within some really fraught institutional frameworks here.
Sydney Skybetter:
So for example, I'm a professor at Brown. It's a 300 year old institution on stolen land built by enslaved labor. I am extending a legacy of displacement and hegemonic violence that while I aim politically in my research and create a practice to counter, I'm nonetheless implicated in it also. This gets even more complicated when we start talking about, for example, some of the robotic research that we're doing here at Brown with military robotics.
Sydney Skybetter:
In order to understand these robotic systems, we have to first acquire them and we have to use military money to buy military robots. So we're participating in this economy that nonetheless seat to dismantle. And so this implication, these implications within a matrix of structures that I disagree with strongly, this is challenging ethically. This is a really pernicious, ethical territory.
Sydney Skybetter:
And a text that really helps in the parsing of these implications is a phenomenal book by critic and scholar, Anna Watkins-Fisher. She wrote a book called The Play In The System, The Art of Parasitical Resistance and this text, it's a adversarial book, but among other things, it argues using artist case studies that we can't step outside of capitalism. We can't just turn off our implications in military technologies. We all use the internet, we all use have our phones. We can't just stop using these things. So the question maybe becomes, how do we deploy our implication in these systems specifically so as to do the work of dismantling?
Sydney Skybetter:
And now this is an intermittently utopian vector. It's sloppy, it's messy, it's complicated, it contradicts itself. But Fisher's argument is that we don't have a choice, but to do this.
Sydney Skybetter:
And I find that really compelling because also in order to understand how military robotics, for example, perpetuates certain kinds of racist violence, we need to actually get the robots. We need to understand the robots and to do that, we need to buy the robots and to buy the robots, we need the grants and to get the grants, we need to have relationships with the military.
Sydney Skybetter:
I don't like any of those things, yet that is how the research happens.
Tim Cynova:
How do you reconcile that as Sydney Skybetter, holding all of those things at the same time?
Sydney Skybetter:
Intermittently. It's a challenge. I don't know that I have a perfect balance or completely equitable understanding of these factors. And part of the difficulty here is that the effects of these implications, the effects of these entanglements is intentionally opaque. It is black boxed.
Sydney Skybetter:
So for example, the robots that we use in the lab, they feed data back to the folks who designed the robots to begin with. It is impossible for me to know how that data is used. Chances are good that that data is used to improve the robotic operation systems overall. And chances are good that by improving the operational qualities of these robots, that the robots become better at things like police surveillance and war fighting.
Sydney Skybetter:
So I can't quantify that. I can't even know that is certain to be the case, but this is also part of the research. This is part of the practice, to discern what data is leaking from these robots and how it's potentially being used.
Sydney Skybetter:
One of the ways that I rationalize this, though, I have to admit this isn't terribly satisfying, is that we engage in the research so as to understand the implications of the research. And I don't know that we have a choice to step away from the nature of the research. Because for example, if we stop working with the robots, it's not as though the robots stop existing. It's not as though the robots are going to, because we aren't paying attention to them, stop being deployed in communities of color or abroad in war fighting environments.
Sydney Skybetter:
My hope is to utilize what privilege I have, what institutional capital and access I can manage, so as to get as close to the system as possible, so as to learn how to create friction, so as to teach my students about how these things work in the world not just in the abstract in a distance critical or journalistic fashion, but at the level of the code, to teach how specifically not only are these robots implicated within larger structures of hegemonic violence, but indeed to teach about our implication in the classroom relative to the robots, relative to the hegemonic violence.
Sydney Skybetter:
For example, we're teaching choreo-robotics in the spring. This is a course that is all about the overlap of choreographic theory and robotic motion planning because Brown University.
Sydney Skybetter:
Anyway, built into the course is critique of us in the course. We are attempting to keep not only our eyes open as professors and instructors, but we are attempting to share this critical uncertainty with our students.
Sydney Skybetter:
Again, it's messy, it's sloppy, it's uncertain, it's a mess, and yet this is where the work is, I think, especially when it pertains to these emerging technologies.
Tim Cynova:
Sydney, that's really fascinating. And you weren't always buying military robots. Can you talk about what brought you to this work of justice and did you come directly to justice or what was that journey like, and why is this important to you?
Sydney Skybetter:
I have long been interested in the relationship of bodies and emerging technologies of all sorts, and going back against historically, I'm a conservatory trained dancer. I have conservatory training in creating dances for stages using stage lighting and costuming, selling tickets through the technical apparatus of what's called a theater and using technologies of marketing and communications. All of the ways that we understand live performance are embedded with numerous interlocking technologies that at one point were emergent.
Sydney Skybetter:
One of the ways that I got into robotics and the currently emergent technologies such as robotics, is by studying historical emerging technologies. For example, the proscenium stage was itself an emerging technology from the 1600s into the 1700. The proscenium stage was an immensely controversial technology. French cultures argued that the proscenium stage was going to kill ballet, until a hundred years passed and all the cultures themselves died and then everybody kind of forgot what the hullabaloo was about. And now we have proscenium stages everywhere.
Sydney Skybetter:
The point being that all of these technologies that are now naturalized and understood as part of performing arts practice, at one point were emergent. Whether we're talking about the internet, social media, virtual reality, robotics, these are contemporarily emerging technologies and I want to understand how they affect bodies and their performances in various ways.
Sydney Skybetter:
Passing to this, is a crucial turn, namely that within a lot of these computational systems, our bodies are not just performing for other people. For example, in the Zuckerberg Meta universe, where our bodies are represented in some fictitious virtual world represented as avatars that are performing for other avatars that are in fact other people. When we're talking about some of these surveillance technologies in particular, there is no human on the other end of the performance.
Sydney Skybetter:
We are performing constantly for the computational apparatus. I'm thinking, for example, also of Facebook's omnipresent tracking Facebook, which has approaching 2 billion users or something at this point, incessantly tracks the geographic location of each of its users over all of time. Facebook serves advertisements on the basis of our movements through space and time. And this for me is a choreographic function. This is bodies moving in space and time towards certain kinds of meanings.
Sydney Skybetter:
The difference here is though that in contrast to me performing on a stage for an audience of people, all two billion of us on Facebook are constantly performing for a massively artificially intelligent borg that we call Facebook. We are performing for the computational system, the surveillance computational system.
Sydney Skybetter:
This for me is bananas. This is a deep stack of bonkers and my work over the last decade or so has been try and figure out how choreography and dancer league practice give us a critical vocabulary to contend with some of these issues. How are these emerging technologies such as Facebook's AI, how can we tie these now emerging technologies to historical technologies and interventions like the proscenium?
Sydney Skybetter:
So, no, I haven't always been buying military robots, but to me, the military robots and I'm thinking here of the work of Boston Dynamics in particular, which creates dancing robotic performances online and in real life, this is part of a dance historical genealogy that I take really seriously, not only in terms of performance, but in terms of emerging technologies.
Tim Cynova:
Have you always defined it as justice?
Sydney Skybetter:
No. No. I have not always been thinking about this in context of justice. There are a number of crucial black feminist thinkers whose work in scholarship totally not only changed my research game, but completely formulatively undergird what I now understand as my practicing critique.
Sydney Skybetter:
I'm thinking here of Simone Brown who wrote a phenomenal book called Dark Matters that traces the genealogy of emerging technologies back to the 1700s, back to triangle trade. She illustrates how contemporary surveillance technologies have roots in then emerging technologies of the slave gullying, lamp lighting laws.
Sydney Skybetter:
Emerging technologies of surveillance, for example, that are deployed at the TSA, they originate conceptually 300 years ago in specifically anti-black racism. So this book, Dark Matters, illustrates how the practice of anti-blackness specifically not only is it a tale as old as time, but is consistently found in emerging surveillance technologies for the last three or 400 years.
Sydney Skybetter:
So Simone Brown's work has been absolutely instrumental and specifically reading that book in 2016 or whenever it was that it came out, that text really helped reorient me away from "Look at all this cool that technology can do," towards, "Look at all this hellaciously damaging emerging technology that has existed for centuries."
Sydney Skybetter:
We consider the Facebook stuff, for example, to be new and novel, and a lot of the utopian dressing of these emerging technologies emphasizes the newness,
Sydney Skybetter:
The possibility of it all Simone brown is one of many black feminist thinkers who point out actually not only is none of this new, but it's as old and as damaging as the triangle trade itself.
Tim Cynova:
Spending so much time with technologies understanding the negative impacts of them, how they might be used, what's in your stack these days? What tech are you using and not using? And what apps are you like, "That seems cool, but I'm not willing to put up with how that data is being used."
Sydney Skybetter:
That's a great question. And here too, I'm deeply unsatisfied by my own answer. So for example, I'm very aware of how ruinous Facebook and its app ecosystem has been in terms of destabilizing democracies over all over the planet, in terms of inciting and incentivizing racialized violence. I am very aware that Facebook and by extension, all of its corporate partners, including to a certain extent, Oculus, are mired in all manner of specifically racist violence.
Sydney Skybetter:
And yet as someone who could be mistaken for a public intellectual, I have to communicate to people where folks read, where they get content, where they are. And so on one hand, I would very much love to absent myself from the Facebook ecology. And yet I know that when I do that, I will not be as successful in maintaining a critique of the very technology I'm using to manufacture that critique.
Sydney Skybetter:
This doesn't make me happy. I don't like it, but the fact of the matter is that there is not only an economic cost to my not using, in this case, Facebook, but I would be less successful at understanding and critiquing it if I were to absent myself from it.
Sydney Skybetter:
This is maybe convenient on some level. There's a good chance that for example, after a couple years of doing work with the military robotics, that I will stop. I'm not sure how that's going to go, but I want to be clear that just because I'm doing work on these platforms now, I do not necessarily plan to do it forever.
Sydney Skybetter:
I want to be really candid about how this research is unfolding. The robotics work in particular is less than a year old. We have only just started building the curricular scaffolding across my department, which is Theater Arts and Performance Studies and computer science, where these robots actually live.
Sydney Skybetter:
There's a lot of like infrastructure that we are building as a function of this course, as well as the Center for Research and Choreographic Interfaces. And it could be that all of that infrastructure is useful and we do it in perpetuity, but it could also be that we decide that our implication in these systems is so horrific that we dissolve the entire thing.
Sydney Skybetter:
This for me, starts to get at a question of "Well, what is the nature of the work?"
Sydney Skybetter:
Is the nature of the work to continue doing whatever it is that you're doing forever because it's convenient or because of legacy costs, or inertia.
Sydney Skybetter:
And I want to say that I'm working with the robotics right now, and I think it's likely that I'll continue doing that in the future. But if we decide that the harms are greater than the potential benefit of the continuation of the research, we will absolutely stop.
Sydney Skybetter:
And so we haven't stopped any form of this research just yet. It's never far from my mind that we might have to completely pull the plug, and I'm totally willing and game to do that.
Tim Cynova:
Well, you talk about the work as it relates to choreo-robotics. Oftentimes, we refer to the work when we talk about anti-racism, anti-oppression, as the learning and as the journey in particular, as white guys with relative power and privilege, that looks similar and different depending on where we started and how we interact with those around us.
Tim Cynova:
Can you unpack a little bit of what has your journey been like? And you've already a number of books and people who have had influence on your thinking in life. What has that journey been like though, and what are some other things that you found to be really impactful along the way.
Sydney Skybetter:
Maybe to start, I've become mindful of what privilege means in this context, within my body, and institutional position. Functionally, privilege, I think in this context means the ability to make and enact choices. Privilege is my ability to decide what it is that I'm going to do, and then do it.
Sydney Skybetter:
And this, I think comes with no small amount of responsibility when it comes to, again, what we're euphemistically referring to as the work. What does the work, what does that mean?
Sydney Skybetter:
The privilege that I occupy is in relation to hegemonic violence everywhere. So the pervasiveness and subtlety of hegemony, it's like the matrix it's everywhere. Maybe to borrow a little bit from the Wackowski siblings and a little bit from Kimberley Crenshaw, we're all in a prison that for many of us, we can neither feel nor taste nor touch. It's everywhere.
Sydney Skybetter:
But this means that the work of resistance has to be equally ubiquitous. It means that from making decisions about how I structure my payroll, to how I parent my children, I need to always be looking for ways to learn and to do the work. It's all the work.
Sydney Skybetter:
And if that sounds exhausting to the other white folks listening in today, imagine what it's like for the folks, for whom prison isn't a metaphor, the folks for whom the very notion of America was constructed to subjugate.
Sydney Skybetter:
I choose to engage in this work because I was afforded the choice. And also because choosing not to make a choice is a choice too.
Tim Cynova:
I often think of that when something happens and it's exhausting. I'm exhausted. And well, if I'm a white guy, like...
Sydney Skybetter:
It's like, "Really?"
Tim Cynova:
Yeah, yeah. I've actually found that to be helpful. And to help me re-engage in those moments, because it's sort of, "Okay, come on. Not really that exhausted. This is work that is required of us," but at the same time, you're like, "How do you balance that with self-care, especially mid a global pandemic where all of our lives are being impacted in new and different ways?" I find that a challenge, but also part of the responsibility.
Sydney Skybetter:
Totally. And that question of care, speaking of ubiquity, I think this question of care it's capacious, and I think useful when thinking about how we engage or do the work under capitalism. And this gets me back to the parasitism thing for a bit, how we understand self-care is popularly like taking a yoga class or whatever, and that's the consumer culture answer to self-care. But if you think about like the things that are making us exhausted, if you think about the things that are making us tired, a yoga class doesn't address systemic racism. A yoga class doesn't address racial capitalism. So if you find yourself tired, yeah yoga can be great, but it's maybe worth thinking about the difference between addressing a symptom of that exhaustion and a cause. The cause is always capitalism.
Tim Cynova:
Well, let's play out this a little bit more, or let's pull this out a little bit more as we think about those who might be listing in particular, those white guys who might be listening, who are earlier in the journey in understanding how they're moving through the system and how there's white advantage to just being the color that they are. What advice, what reflections, what prompts do you think might be helpful as people are wrestling with this understanding and early journey?
Sydney Skybetter:
I run it to a lot of folks who share similar positions of privilege, who are not sure about their implication in these things and not really sure if they're implicated in these structures or not, or if they have work to do. When it comes to starting off, part of that initial catalyst is understanding just how deeply we are all necessarily, definitionally implicated in these structures of privilege and violence.
Sydney Skybetter:
And for those who have doubt, Robert De Niro has this line in the film Ronan, which is a very bad film, and I do not recommend it, except for this line. Bob De Niro, I call him Bob, because we're friends, he plays an ex CIA spook or something. I don't know. And he's doing an op and something doesn't feel right. And as a result of his decades of experience, he gets the wrong feeling from an op, and he says something to the effect of, "If there is doubt, then there is no doubt."
Sydney Skybetter:
And what he means by this is that if you have a sense that something's wrong, if you have a sense that you're implicated in these things, if you have a sense that something is going to go awry, then if it is.
Sydney Skybetter:
So if you have a sense specifically as a white man or somebody who occupies these positions of a structural privilege, if you have a sense that there's something for you to do in this arena, if you have a sense that there's work for you to do, then I promise you are totally right. There is. And if you don't think that there's work for you to do you're some combination of wrong or lying to yourself.
Sydney Skybetter:
I think the first step is to understand that whether you think you are implicated in these systems or not, you are. The system only benefits by you thinking there isn't a system in place.
Tim Cynova:
Let's talk about those systems because I've mentioned before we're two years almost into a global pandemic where we've seen the system in different ways, where people who might not have seen the systems, all of a sudden are interacting with things and coming to realize that there's stuff at play that they might not have known.
Tim Cynova:
As you think about the work and you intersecting with these systems, how have they looked different, amid a global pandemic?
Sydney Skybetter:
I'll talk a about the work at CRCI in particular. So our last convening was in early March of 2020. This is an international conference and we were literally a single person's being late to a meeting away from being a super spreading event. And we shut down our operations for a full year, because at first we just didn't really have a framework yet to continue the work, specifically of convening and gathering and discussing, but also we shut down because other organizations were doing phenomenal work in this arena and had infrastructure that were perfectly capable of continuing to distribute their communications and build community. AI Now, the Algorithmic Justice League, Data and Society, these are organizations with very similar politics and interventions as ours. And so for a big chunk of the early pandemic, our website was basically like, "Okay, if you like CRCI, you should give all of your attention and money to AI Now and Algorithmic Justice League. Go support those other folks. We are not in a position to productively intervene right now. They are. Go to them."
Sydney Skybetter:
Now some, two years later, our infrastructure now is totally virtual. We figured out new workflows, like so many of us have, and we have a convening coming up in May actually, but it's very small, in-person, but with a huge online footprint. We're still figuring it out.
Sydney Skybetter:
Functionally though, in this early phase, as now, we've oriented ourselves to be of service and support. So if anything, the pandemic moment has shown us the importance of being of service and being candid with ourselves about whether or not we are, or aren't the best people to do the work that we're striving to. It could be that actually convening stuff is not best done by us, but instead by others.
Sydney Skybetter:
The point is that the relative success of my work or my adventures is not the objective here. I'm not here for the success of CRCI or for my own research agenda. The point of the work is to get the work done, and whoever is capable of engaging of being activated, given the shifting mercurial tides at the COVID moment, those are the folks that I want to be in support of.
Tim Cynova:
One of the quotes I've been sharing to get people's reactions to is from a colleague Courtney Harge. She's the CEO OF/BY/FOR ALL, former colleague, coworker at Fractured Atlas, brilliant person, and she and I were talking about a session that we were doing and got all the way to the session where we were talking about how do you create policies and practices and procedures and language in an organization while centering anti-racism anti-oppression and all the way to the end. And someone raised their hand and said, "This has all been really interesting, but can you like give some tangible examples?" At this moment. We're like, "How have I failed you all? The entire thing was tangible examples of how to do this thing." And so Courtney and I are talking about this and she said, "I think people confuse tangible with impactful, and impactful with visible. Adding pronouns to emails, tangible. Ending gender discrimination is impactful. Increasing in gender diversity at an organization is visible."
Tim Cynova:
As you think about your work and approach at Brown and with the institute, what resonates with you in these distinctions?
Sydney Skybetter:
First off, Courtney's fucking brilliant. I love that framework. That's a really great framework. I'm reminded of a throwaway line of Foucault's, that's been reimagined and reinterpreted by Black Feminist Surveillance Scholarship. The line is something like, "Visibility is a trap." Now Foucault was thinking about cercarial surveillance and more contemporary usages illustrate that applicability to the quotidian, our daily lives.
Sydney Skybetter:
But simultaneous to that, Ruha Benjamin has this other great line in her Race After Technology, that black folks live in the future. And what she means by this is that emerging surveillance technologies are almost always first deployed and perfected on communities of color.
Sydney Skybetter:
But we have to remember, and this is for you know, white folks on the fence that as though that deployment of military technologies and communities of color wasn't bad enough, eventually, always, these surveillance technologies turn on society at large. And that means you.
Sydney Skybetter:
I think about visibility a lot, both at the level of surveillance, but also within our organizational structure. CRCI is able to do our work because at some level, Brown University doesn't really understand what it is that we do or are seeking to do. And our impact in working against structures that perpetuate institutional racism within these emerging technologies is on some level, contingent on our ability to not be visible performing as such.
Sydney Skybetter:
And so you can imagine as previously discussed, this is a pretty fucking delicate balance here, and one that is incredibly emergent and that I feel very uncertain in. This is something that we are working on or towards. But here too, I'm guided by Anna Watkins Fisher, by the theorizing of the parasitic. I'm thinking of Legacy Russell and Glitch Feminism. I'm thinking of Simone Brown's Dark Matters, D'Ignazio's Data Feminism. There's no shortage of phenomenal feminist scholarship on and around these issues.
Sydney Skybetter:
Functionally though, what these texts have taught me is that a straightforward, sequential understanding of the relationship between tangibility and visibility, and impactfulness. And these things are not always proportional and that proportionality or sequencialness is misleading. Sometimes you have to mix up the ratio to get the work done.
Tim Cynova:
We are coming up to the end of our time together, landing the plane. What else is on your mind? How do you want to close this one?
Sydney Skybetter:
Two things come to mind first, this choreo-robotics course in the spring, I'm really excited about it specifically because it's very, very hard. It is easily the most complicated course, but potentially also project I've ever done at Brown.
Sydney Skybetter:
And one of the things that makes me really excited about it though, is that we're engaging a number of artists who are there for the tango, whose artistic practices resonate with the problematics of the course itself.
Sydney Skybetter:
So for example, we're bringing in a phenomenal choreographer, [Gene 00:34:30] Castro and technologist, Stephan Moore. They came to us with the challenge of creating a robotic orchestra that is capable of improvising with Gene's dancers, and the specific nature of that improvisation is the ability of a robot to play an instrument that comes from Puerto Rico called the [Guerrowhich 00:34:47] is functionally an emptied out gourd that you strike with a comb.
Sydney Skybetter:
And so, because we are trying to center artistic research within this course that's notionally about robotics, we are using this prompt to center and structure the entire course. And so if you imagine the numerous interlocking super, super duper hard technical challenges that come from a robot that's capable of improvising with dancers. Just name a few, it's like first there has to be a robot that's capable of holding onto the go and holding onto a comb. And then they have to run into each other through a series of gestures that create sound.
Sydney Skybetter:
But how does a robot know if it's making the right sounds? Well, it has to be able to hear what it's doing. So you have to have various senses like sonic sensors, beat detection that are capable of sonically registering whether or not the instrument is being played correctly, and then the robot has to be able to correct itself if it's playing the instrument wrong.
Sydney Skybetter:
But then we also need sensors that are capable of discerning multiple simultaneous dancers moving across time and space. So the robot has to be able to figure in relation to those dancers, what it is doing. Also, there's other robots doing things with instruments. So you can tell that the number of computational and technical challenges here that specifically emerge as a result of Gene's work, it's really, really, really, really hard.
Sydney Skybetter:
Again, gene's artistic practice is the thing that is galvanizing the technical research. But the meta-cranal here, and this speaks to Gene's specific practice as a Puerto Rican woman, she's also very deeply concerned with what happens when you extract cultural data, such as how to play an instrument like the guero, which is indigenous to Puerto Rico. How you automate that you turn that practice into data and then apply it to an automated system like a robot. This is an extractive violence of a sort. So specifically, how does she create a performance that is about those structural violences while also participating and partaking in them?
Sydney Skybetter:
So this is, again, a question of implication and parasitism. She is using the robotics research to get at a larger point about colonial exploitation.
Sydney Skybetter:
We're going to be presenting this work in some fashion at the 2022 conference Research On Choreographic Interfaces, which is May 6th and 7th. We have a title for this convening that I'm really proud of. It's, CRCI 22: This is Going To Be Pretty Awkward.
Sydney Skybetter:
On some level, the conference is about opacity, it's about implication, it's about these black boxy awkwardnesses, but it's also, and we're going to have to acknowledge this in all sorts of ways, it's going to be really weird having people in shared space and time.
Sydney Skybetter:
I don't know how you do that, but we're going to figure it out. So all to say that the next stuff coming up is this choreo-robotics course. And the CRCI Conference. In terms of what's next, I want to be candid here. So much of this work is coalitional in nature. Not just the robotics stuff, not just the military research stuff, not just the choreographic research or whatever, but the work of being first in relation, and then working against the structures of power that we've been discussing for the last hour. This is coalitional work. It's affinity bound. It is organizing.
Sydney Skybetter:
I'm in many ways, new to this. I'm still very much learning how to do this. This is a very nascent practice, relatively speaking, for me. But if there's anything that I can do be of support to others who are taking up this work, who are interested in this work, if there's anything that I can do to learn more, or better, or faster how to understand my own implication and participation in these systems, I'm totally here for it.
Sydney Skybetter:
My email address literally is skybetter@brown.edu, and if anybody wants to talk more about these things, if there's anything that I can or should be doing, I hope they'll reach out and let me know.
Tim Cynova:
Cindy, thank you for the offering. Thank you for the fascinating look in into these different lenses that impact work in society and structures.
Tim Cynova:
It's always fun to get the band back together. Thank you so much for taking time. A friend, it's a pleasure to chat with you about this work. Thanks so much for being on the podcast.
Sydney Skybetter:
Totally. My pleasure. Thanks so much, Tim.
Tim Cynova:
If you've enjoyed the conversation or are just feeling generous today, please consider writing a review on iTunes so that others who might be interested in the topic and enjoying the fun too, give it a thumbs up or a five stars, or phone a friend, whatever your podcasting platform of choice offers.
Tim Cynova:
Until next time. Thanks for listening.
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