I need to know! Discomfort in machine curiosity

Curiosity presents an apparent paradox that has long puzzled thinkers: the experience of curiosity can be downright unpleasant, a gnawing need to find out. Yet humans regularly seek out curiosity-inducing situations, as demonstrated by the popularity of cliffhanger-permeated television and books, puzzle rooms, and even crosswords. Whether we like how it feels or not, our present society values curiosity, which has lead to thriving communities of researchers interested in better understanding the mechanisms behind curiosity in humans and other animals and researchers interested in creating mechanisms so that machine intelligences can exhibit curiosity too. The purpose of this presentation is to change how you think about curiosity. I will argue how discomfort can be viewed as central to mechanisms of curiosity, helping it give rise to the properties we value when we think about the place of curiosity in schools, business, and lifelong learning.

Nadia M. Ady (she/they) is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Computing Science. She studies curiosity.

Warning: Multilingual writing may cause confusion, discomfort, and repulsion

“Your Romanian loses the reader. Please re-work from Romanian to English, our lingua scholastica. I completely checked out after that part in Romanian. Shouldn’t the Romanian words appear in italics? Why aren’t there footnotes, or a translation, or a glossary? Not translating the Romanian seems arrogant: personally, I would want my writing to be understood. If Romanian was a well-known language like Spanish, you could probably get away with this much code-switching. Are the goals to create dissonance and ambiguity? Why not accessibility and clarity? I don’t feel like I’m the audience for this piece. I didn’t translate the Romanian phrases—it was clear the author didn’t want me to. If the goal was to unsettle, it worked.”

In this poetic inquiry performance, I explore the verbatim reactions I have had to my multilingual writing in academia and in the literary world. I also share community responses to The Polyglot—a digital magazine of poetry and art that I founded in 2016, which has published 148 writers and artists in 43 languages in the last seven issues. I am interested in exploring: What is it about hearing or reading so-called “foreign,” or “non-English” languages that often makes us uncomfortable? How may we learn to embrace the ambiguity și disconfortul that accompanies being a language learner? I argue that multilingual writing calls forth ways of a ști, a fi, si a gândi (knowing, being, and thinking) that require the reader/listener to be empathetic, curious, and active in their detective work. Ai nevoie de o inimă înţelegătoare și un suflet deschis. Though English is the main “carrier” language in this presentation, I also blend insights in my mother tongue (limba română) and other languages that I speak, think, dream, and work in (español, français, italiano). I employ creative code-switching, weaving together diferentes lenguas, to “keep my tongue wild” (Anzaldúa, 1987, p. 40), to “force attention to lingual hybridity as a state of existence” (Verissimo, 2019, para. 19), to challenge dominant monolingual perceptions of multilingualism through poetry (Niaz, 2011), and to raise the status of Heritage Languages in academic and creative writing. In doing so, I wish to unsettle and challenge the deeply entrenched (yet largely unaddressed) Anglocentrism in academia and publishing worlds that often erase or suppress multilingual voices. De-abia aștept sa ne vedem.

Adriana Oniță (adrianaonita.com) is a Romanian-Canadian multilingual poet, artist, educator, and researcher. A Killam scholar, Adriana is currently completing her PhD in Second Language Education at the University of Alberta, where she teaches and researches youth Heritage Language maintenance through the arts.

The Drop/ReXConnectionX

This multimedia Lightning Talk explores the suspended uncertainty of the video call. Marred with connection dropouts, software malfunctions, and at the whims of the elements (e.g. the sun moving behind a cloud), the video and audio capture is uncertain: it is one moment there, then not, or worse — there distorted. This talk zeroes in on that moment of suspension: the freeze, the stutter, the moment before the drop (or reconnection). This moment of potentiality discomfits, and moments such as these in succession, sever connection, in ways both digital and human.

Alevtina Lapiy is a student in the Literatures of Modernity program at Ryerson University. Her research interests include digital humanities, philosophy of literature, speculative fiction, queer studies, and film and media.

Covered Teeth

In "Covered Teeth" (2019), I explored the use of technology in the form of social media (for example by posting pictures) as a way to take part and protest against social injustice. It also wonders and questions the limits within social media as a medium to generate a positive change. And the uncomfortable sensations a user could experiment in the midst of the complex relationship of social media and social change.

Originally from Costa Rica, Pamela Zamora Quesada is a Ph.D. student in Hispanic Studies at UBC. Her project investigates the intersection of sound, gender and politics in Latin America.

Distributing Dance: The Integral Roles of MTV and TikTok in the Popularization of Michael Jackson’s "Thriller" Music Video and Charli D’Amelio’s “#DistanceDance”

Why did Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and Charli D’Amelio’s TikTok dance, “#DistanceDance”, become sensational? And equally as important, how did they become sensational immediately upon release? I argue that the initial platforms of “Thriller” and “#DistanceDance” - Music Television (MTV) and TikTok, respectively - have played key roles in popularizing these media texts into audiovisual phenomena. Academic periodicals, newspapers and archived news clips will be discussed to illustrate the technological circulation tactics and functions of both distribution platforms and the secondary promotions on other media avenues and markets. These strategies have enabled each artist and their work to become cultural forces that contribute to larger cultural shifts.

I will compare the different circulation strategies relevant to both cable television networks (e.g., MTV) and social media platforms (e.g., TikTok), as well as discussing how audiences and users compare in their relationships to the respective platforms, enacting varying forms of agency. Further, I will explore the significant role of secondary promotions on other media distribution platforms and markets (e.g., VHS and music record sales, Nickelodeon’s #KidsTogether and ET Canada online) in popularizing these texts. More crucially, the circulation and success of these videos are beacons that signal deeper cultural implications and pose questions related to certain discomforts within discourses related to race, gender, and personal privacy of one’s domestic space.

Sara Sereda is in her final year of her undergraduate program at the University of Alberta majoring in Psychology. When she isn’t hitting the books you can find her dancing and watching horror movies.

From X to Y: The Ethics of Black Sound Appropriation on TikTok

TikTok is a growing social media platform that preaches a democratization of content, where the average content creator can theoretically “go viral” just as easily as a social media celebrity or influencer. As the application encourages remix and reproduction, users can upload audio to be reused by others to create any kind of content: from comedic to dramatic. But what are the implications of appropriating and popularizing the voices and music of Black creators? Our research will analyze the phenomenon of sound appropriation on TikTok, particularly the use of Black music, AAVE or Black vernacular, phraseology, and speech patterns. We will navigate the ethics of a platform that’s sole purpose is to remix and reuse sounds, choreography, aesthetics in the context of modern digital cultural appropriation and digital structural racism. We will discuss the popularity of using certain Black content creator’s voices, phrases, ways of speaking in new content creation by non-Black authors on the app. Our work will narrow in on a few case studies to analyze the intentions and ethical implications of appropriating Black voices with a digital platform that is specifically created to enable just that.

Sabrina Tharani (she/her) is an after-degree student in the Department of Media Studies, in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta. An avid pop culture junkie, Sabrina's interests lay in exploring the intersections of race and gender within fan communities, and around stan culture, in digital spaces like Twitter and Instagram.

Luthfia Friskie (she/her) is a first generation Black biracial settler in Amiskwaciwâskahikan. She is a second year Library and Information Studies and Digital Humanities graduate student with academic interests in race and technology.

Fanfiction, Unmet Needs, and Kirk and Spock’s Love Story

Fanfiction has a long history of writing in the margins of popular culture, disturbing, re-writing, and inverting common tropes, relationships, and narratives. Often, fanfiction is written through some desire to take control of the cultural narrative, perhaps to express sexualities, orientations, or lifestyles different from the conforming norm. The origins of fanfiction arguably begin with the explosion of Star Trek, science fiction, and fan zines being written by women for women, about the homoerotic relationship they saw between Captain Kirk and Ambassador Spock. Some attitudes towards fanfiction see it as a dirty secret, as the perversion of a canon work into something queer and uncomfortable. What does male/male slash relationships provide for its writers, predominantly female, that they can’t receive from the canon? The answer may be rooted in discomfort, in viewers not receiving the narratives they wish from their favored medias and deciding to create their own. This continues into today’s era of digital literacy and online community, especially regarding women’s and LGBTQ+ presence, or lack thereof, in popular media.

Mary Anderson has a BA in English, and is currently completing her Masters of Library and Information Studies through U of A. Her professional and research interests lie in the phenomena of fandom, participatory culture, gender studies, and media/digital literacies.