Antecedent Technologies and Malware in the Constitution
Amelia Winger-Bearskin will speak about her work re-creating peace-making technologies of the Haudenosaunee (Indigenous Confederacy of the US and Canada). The United States constitution was based on the Haudenosaunee consensus contract known as the “Great Law of Peace”. What were the tenants of this first constitution? How can citizens today re-conceptualize their roles and responsibilities in our democracy? Can we use the tools that once divided us to reimagine a better world, or should we find a way to leave them behind? Winger-Bearskin seeks to bring accountability to algorithms, machine learning, and the broader tech community, and to uphold a practice of hopeful world building.
Amelia Winger-Bearskin is a 2019-2020 Mozilla Fellow hosted at the Co-Creation Studio at the MIT Open Documentary Lab. She is an artist/technologist who empowers people to leverage bleeding edge technology to effect positive change in the world. In 2019 she was an invited presenter to His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s World Headquarters in Dharamsala for the Summit on Fostering Universal Ethics and Compassion. In 2018 she was awarded a MacArthur and Sundance Institute fellowship for her 360-video immersive installation in collaboration with artist Wendy Red Star (supported by the Google JUMP Creator program). The non-profit she founded, IDEA New Rochelle, in partnership with the New Rochelle Mayor’s Office, won the 2018 $1 Million Dollar Bloomberg Mayor’s Challenge to empower the community to co-design their city using her VR/AR citizen tool kit. Amelia is Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma, Deer Clan.