criTECHAL: Visualising the tech industry & critical imaginaries

​The second criTECHal event of this term will be a two-hour workshop.

​Depictions of technologies can help us make the technologies and what they do more tangible. Amira Moeding will present a mini-comic that presents LLMs as (potential) super sloppers meant to make apparent how text-production with LLMs can overwhelm public discourse and individuals. They will discuss how the comic came about what the pictures are intended to do and also what is arguably wrong with some of those pictures. The comic and poster are part of the project ‘Exploring novel figurative language to conceptualise Large Language Models' supported by the Cambridge Incubator Fund.

​Following the presentation, we’ll collectively work on creative visualisations of the ‘big tech’ industry. Whilst the sector has been mapped and conceptualised by those working within the space, we will ask:

• ​what does ‘big tech’ look like from our range of standpoints within/adjacent to the academy?

• ​How might it look from other standpoints - such as those of activists or communities materially affected by ‘big tech’ expansion?

• ​How could we critically imagine what a different tech industry that builds better technology looks like?

​We hope the workshop will help us understand where and how to frame our own critical interventions.

​We will bring paper, pens, & colours to play around, but please bring your laptop if you want to create something digitally!

​Following the workshop, we will head to the Granta for drinks. Welcome to all (also those unable to attend the workshop)!

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​criTECHAL is a group of early career scholars based at the University of Cambridge launching a new, interdisciplinary space, open to all. We think critically about the design, use, and effects of new and emerging digital technologies. Rather than taking technologies themselves as the starting point in our intervention and inquiry, we begin with analyses of specific social contexts. We dissect how the technology industry and technological implementations have become multifaceted actors in existing histories of intersectional inequality and struggles for justice. We will ask: How can we build technologies differently? Are 'good' technologies possible within current infrastructures built by the technology industry and by society more broadly? 

​For more information about the network, please contact Dr Isabelle Higgins, Dr Stefanie Felsberger, Amira Moeding, or sign up to our mailing list here.