On Computation

Ezekiel Dixon-Román’s research on computation is influenced by Black radical anti-colonial thought, as well as cybernetics and critical philosophies of technology. His work focuses partly on how algorithms may reflect and become haunting forces as they pursue certain patterns of data, reproducing the ways in which racial logics and forces of power have historically been embedded in technological systems.

Dixon-Román’s writing explores the implications of computational ideas of recursion, indeterminacy, and technology’s possibility for self-reflexivity. His work, additionally, re-reads ideas of the human that we inherit from the Enlightenment period and from the human’s formation within technology and science.

At EMPAC, Dixon-Román’s talk addresses some of his newest research. He also discusses examples of contemporary artworks that demonstrate the ghostly specters at work in colonial logics, and that push AI away from mechanisms of control.