Natalia Zuluaga

‍I would like to start things off by asking each of you to tell us a little bit about your work and your research.

Jason Edward Lewis

‍I am Jason Lewis, I teach in the Design and Computation Arts Department at Concordia University here in Montreal. I am speaking from Kanien’kehá:ka territory, Mohawk territory, Haundenosaunee territory, from the place known as Tiohtià:ke or Montreal. What do I do? The long running thread is I’m interested in how we manage to communicate with each other. Despite what seems to be a kind of impossibility, it actually occurs. My original art practice was poetry and then when I got to university I was introduced to computers and programming and fell in love with programming as another writing practice and tried to think about how to bring these worlds together. I was lucky that one of my undergraduate advisors was Terry Winograd, who is in the second generation of AI pioneers. By the time I got there, he was deep into questioning the artificial intelligence project and how we were defining AI, intelligence, and so forth. Luckily he encouraged me to really dig into philosophy and cognitive science as well as computer science and computational linguistics.

I’m focused now on thinking about how Indigenous communities use computational technology, and even more specifically, how our knowledge practices can or cannot be expressed through computational technology, and thinking about the question of AI from an Indigenous perspective. I co-founded and co-directed the series Indigenous Protocol and AI Workshops, which I arrived at through an essay called “Making Kin with the Machines” that I wrote with Noelani Arista, Archer Pechawis, and Suzanne Kite in 2018, where I crystallized my thinking about what it means to take Indigenous kinship practices and protocols and extend them specifically to artificial intelligence and implicitly to all computational technologies. It was fantastic to think through those questions from Lakota, Hawaiian, and Cree perspectives. The four of us had so much fun and we thought it was so interesting, but we also thought, “You know what, we may just be in a really weird bubble; let's go talk to some of our peers to see if they think we’re crazy.” So we got thirty-five folks together—thirty of them Indigenous from North America, the Pacific, Australia, New Zealand—to look at AI from Indigenous perspectives. We then wrote the position paper, which was published in the summer of 2020, and it helped kick off a number of interesting conversations and also helped bring my attention to the fact that, of course, other people are thinking things like this from other cultural perspectives. So now we’re trying to pull together a group of people to go to the next stage. We’ve critiqued normative AI, and we’ve conceptualized alternatives, and while there’s certainly still lots to talk about, the question now is: Can we actually build anything from a Hawaiian perspective or a Cree perspective? How do we get into creative, productive, and respectful collaboration with the people who build these technologies? Some of us do build AI systems, but not enough, so it's also about growing capacity within Indigenous communities to eventually be able to build these technologies in the way that we want them built.

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Alenda Y. Chang

‍There are actually a lot of commonalities in our work even though they’re not necessarily highlighted in the book that I published recently, Playing Nature Ecology in Video Games. I’m known primarily for my ecocritical environmental perspective on video games. Because my book is trying to intervene in this realm that’s usually masculine and colonialist and has all these other really problematic things baked into the culture and to the form, I draw a lot on feminist materialist worldviews, so I think there are thinkers that we share.

JEL

‍Yes, absolutely.

AYC

‍My work falls within the broader umbrella of environmental media studies, so I do a lot of thinking about infrastructure in relation to media industries, and my more recent work is drilling down into the world of digital modeling, so there’s that crossover between our work as well. I got really obsessed with digital vegetation and this weird world of companies that service the film, television, and game industries by producing readymade plants. That’s my rabbit hole lately, being obsessed with how a lot of worldly things are being modeled in our everyday visual surround. It’s not just games, it’s everywhere, like movies and Sesame Street and Game of Thrones, quality TV, that kind of stuff. There are a lot of good connections between Jason’s work and my work.

NZ

‍Thank you both for that, it’s nice to see the overlaps in your work and interests. The first thing I want to bring to the table is the idea of the future in both of your work. When I think about these forever-emerging technologies—computation, machine learning, AI—I often wonder how they impact the future. A lot of the images that are produced on these platforms allude to the otherworldly, which feeds the idea that we’re thinking and seeing beyond today through these technologies. With that in mind, I was wondering if we could start there and if each of you could tell me a little bit more about what’s at stake in your work when you think about the future.

AYC

‍I think I’m having that experience of an early career academic having finished my first book, which is usually your baby, your pet project, and now wondering: What am I going to do with my time remaining? So I am thinking about what scholarship can be most impactful right now. I think the climate crisis and other kinds of social crises really emphasize that the academy can be very insular. How can you broaden the impact of the work you do and be in conversation with more groups? In terms of my interest in game studies and in games and play in general, I have been thinking a lot about the value of play when the world is on fire. It’s sort of an existential question. My world was literally on fire just a couple of weeks ago when we had the Alisal fire near Santa Barbara. I have been wrestling with these kinds of questions because I do think there is still a value in play and the corollaries of creativity that I think are very easy to dismiss as frivolous or unnecessary when we’re confronted with large-scale problems. But there’s something about the playful mindset and about those experiences that I think is actually vital to the sort of responses that we need to cultivate. I’m always interested in the science and art crossover, too, because I just have a nerd science brain and am really interested in the life sciences. I've been thinking a lot about the precarity of play in the 21st century; we can talk about everything from climate to sports. I’ve been looking at the energy and supply chain and infrastructures of play and the kinds of foreclosing of experiences that are happening in this time for younger generations, and also thinking about how the digital can either simulate that kind of foreclosing of experience or create a widening out of experiences. It's a very general way of thinking about it, but I just keep going back to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass, which has this great quote that I use everywhere: “Play is how we limber up for the work of the world.” She’s talking about playing in the mud with plants and stuff like that, but I still embrace that as a mantra for thinking ahead.

NZ

‍Within this idea of foreclosure of experiences or the ability to open up, is it because gaming and play itself in your view are tools that are open-ended? There isn’t a qualifying good or bad?

AYC

‍Yeah, in some ways I think we have to acknowledge that games are systems and so they cultivate a certain kind of systems thinking. There have been people who point cynically to that, in the sense that games ultimately just train you to be very good bureaucrats or pencil pushers, but there’s maybe a more optimistic note to sound in the sense that training in systems thinking also allows you to undermine those forms or those systems or to imagine other systems. There can be an open-endedness in that. I don’t think games are the end all, be all. It’s just the area I’m most familiar with, and I’m also really interested in other creative media. Games, for me, were the perfect locus, because they’re so counterintuitive in terms of thinking about games as cultivating natural understanding, which is why I love Jason’s idea of digital Earth: We can actually make kin with these things. It’s not just a knee-jerk separation, because I think that doesn’t get us very far.

JEL

‍For me, it means something very similar to what Alenda was talking about with play. It’s about creating spaces where we can think otherwise, play out the consequences of thinking otherwise, and imagine what kind of systems and structures need to come into play in order for that otherwise to come into being.

Sometimes I’ll say “I,” sometimes I’ll say “we.” Usually when I say “we,” I mean me and Skawennati, my wife and long-term collaborator in Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC), because I’ve been having this conversation with her for twenty-one years. We came to the future of framing and the concept of the future imaginary from our work with Indigenous youth. We’re both huge science fiction fans, so it’s not like it came out of nowhere, but one of the things we found in the mid 2000s, when we started our Skins Workshops on Aboriginal Storytelling and Digital Media Design, is that a lot of the youth we worked with didn’t necessarily have very positive ideas about what the future might bring, or if they did, they tended to be ideas about the future that came from Western pop culture. The usuals: Star Wars, Blade Runner, Alien. Sometimes there would be something non-Western in there, usually from anime. But none of it came from Indigenous future imaginaries. None from Mohawk imaginaries, and this was the main community with which we worked in the early days. We found it troublesome that their ideas of the future came from these Western imaginaries. And it made us realize how true that was for us as well! These were futures with almost no brown people in them and zero Indigenous people. Or at best, highly caricatured representations of us. Over several years of doing the Skins Workshops, talking about the future with the participants, and doing a little bit of research into the detrimental effects of not having expansive futures in your imagination for yourself and your community, we came up with the Initiative for Indigenous Futures. We decided to take the work we were doing and frame it to generate discussions within our communities that take the future seriously. We often talk about the seventh generation as our horizon. We know that people take the general idea of the future and the general idea of the seventh generation seriously, but we didn’t see a lot of people having the room and the space and encouragement to sit down and materialize those futures in some way—as a story, a video game, an illustration, whatever it might be. That’s really what the Initiative has been about for the last seven years, doing that in many different ways, including in academic and scholarly ways, including the writing that you’re citing, Natalia, and the symposia, and things like that. It’s vitally important. A community that doesn’t have dreams about the future that it wants is in trouble. I also think that a community is in trouble if most of what they are dreaming about for the future is a kind of recapitulation of the past. There are definitely people who think differently though—we can’t go back to 500 years ago. We certainly can’t tell our youth that the only way to be Mohawk or Hawaiian is if you take up the lifeways our ancestors had before contact. It’s just not going to travel.

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That fight for the future is important. Our lack of presence in the Western future is scary. Nalo Hopkinson, the science fiction writer, talks about how it’s scary if you’re surrounded by a culture that has these amazing visions of the future, and you’re not there and there’s nobody there that looks like you. That’s telling us something we need to pay attention to and do something about.

And then closer to the play thing, I think about adrienne maree brown talking about emergent strategies and how science fiction is a way of practicing the future. That’s really what we’re trying to get to. Practicing the future together—the together is important, because it allows us to lay out a vision and invite other people in and ask, what does this look like to you? How is this going to play out with your family, your clan, your community, the communities you’re in relationship with? It looks pretty good from where I’m standing, but it might actually be really bad for somebody standing over there. So how do we actually get into that? One of the things that drives me nuts about most of these futuring consultancies is that hardly any of them have artists on staff. It’s all economists and political scientists and sometimes a philosopher or historian. And you have to ask, how can you think you’re imagining alternative futures if you don’t have artists?

We’ve always centered art in our work. We’re artists—I’m an artist, my wife is a much better one. It’s always been part of our work, whether we were doing something that was in the academic sphere or in technology development, or in the community. Art is the thing that we always bring with us as a tool of imagination. What's at stake? When we look to the future, are we there? Imagining that future presence now is a necessary precondition for us being part of the future when it arrives. I feel that strongly. I feel it more strongly now, after the last five years, than I did then when we started, because what I see now is an attempt to close down the past as prelude to closing down the future.

AYC

‍I share the science fiction thing, too. We need more Butler and Jemisin and others. I was just rereading the preface to Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and it’s so great because she actually says, “I’m not really writing about the future, I’m writing about the present.” So this is science fiction, but I’m writing about us here, now, too.

NZ

‍Art, visualization, and images in general play such a big role in the way both of you are thinking, whether it be through gameplay or being an artist. So I wanted to ask, why art? I understand the imagining part of it, but what are other faculties that art has that have a place within this process of enacting different futures?

JEL

‍Practicing art is to practice an understanding that the world is made. The world is made through a series of decisions by people. As an artist you get to do that, you’re like, I’m going to make this thing. And you make this thing, and you’ve conjured a new thing into the world. Underlying that is a skeptical attitude towards what is given or assumed to be fact. One of the talks that I was giving for a while, probably six or seven years ago, was called “On Not Taking What You’re Given.” One of the things we’re really trying to get across to our students and to my teenage sons now is that all our systems, the established systems, our politics, our economic order, our academic order, are going to try to convince you that there’s a bunch of things that you simply have to take on faith. You simply have to assume in order to be an intelligent person and act properly in this world, and a big part of what we’re trying to say is, fuck that, no you don’t. There’s some pretty basic stuff, like don’t go around hitting people and stuff like that but after that it’s like, look at the history of crazy-ass decisions made by people who were tired, or mad, or jealous, or operating on bad information. What we try to do is get people to really look at how constructed our political/social/economic lives are and how it’s possible to deconstruct them, at least in our minds. It’s much harder in reality, but at least possible with our critical facilities and artists with their ability to make things that can question and challenge and play and highlight in ways that surprise and engage us, ways that other forms of communicating don’t do as well. That’s one way I think that art’s important.

AYC

‍I don’t think I would qualify myself as an artist, even though I’ve done some game design and I’ve made films, but I think I share a similar sentiment that the value of art is in its ability to produce messiness. Not all art fits that label, so I would go back to my roots in rhetorical training and science and technology studies to say that it’s clear that information by itself or data, which we can question, are not going to always make the case for things like climate change and so we need those kinds of cultural forms of mediation to persuade and to provoke emotion and emotional response in people, and also to build social life. I feel like we need art and those other kinds of aesthetic intermediaries, including the form of games or collaborative play. It’s not necessarily just these utopian kinds of emotions but also addressing what seems like a calamitous rise in anxiety and mental health crises related to all of these things that we’re facing. I don’t know if I would say art is therapeutic, I guess we can debate this, but it allows the confrontation and the discussion that would help with that.

NZ

‍I want to hold this space for allowing confrontation and practicing that the world is made to shift gears and think about nature, and by extension climate.

Alenda, in your book you speak critically about infrastructures and resource extraction that a lot of these technologies rely on, but you also mention the capacity of these technologies to render things like climate change more operable, and that has a kind of optimistic tone to it, so I was hoping we can talk about that.

I’m also curious about the entanglements—the resource entanglements, the actual friction of the material world—of gaming. I think we’re speaking much more about a system that is both abstract but also more opaque. In my lifetime alone the world—not just the devices—is becoming more of a black box. And as the world gravitates toward this tendency, I really appreciate this idea that something like gaming can make those abstractions more operable, more accessible, more visual and so I was wondering if you could elaborate a little bit.

AYC

‍I appreciate Jason saying that you don’t have to take what you’re given, because to me it’s so sad that the vast majority of games essentially replicate these mindsets from the real world about the relationship between humans and “nature,” which I don’t think is a tenable separation anyway, but it's instrumentally used through resource extraction or as a picturesque backdrop to human activity. It’s really sad that most of the interactive environments our kids are playing, that everybody’s playing, rely on those paradigms. A lot of the impetus for my book was asking what we can do that’s outside of these paradigms. My training was in literature and then film. People in literary circles have been having these incredibly rich conversations about natural representation for years and years, primarily focused around poetry and nature writing and that kind of canon, but that wasn’t happening at all in the new media circles I was running in. I thought it was really fruitful to have those worlds collide and to use games as a case study. What is more counterintuitive than the game version of Walden? I found these kinds of things that would raise the hackles of a lot of environmental educators or literary theorists really productive. I thought, That’s really wild, let’s run with it and what can we actually glean about human relations with the natural world from these kinds of experiments.

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I’m also really influenced by things like ecological economics and thermodynamics and critical infrastructure studies. In my work I also try to look at the context of gameplay, so everything from the stereotypical man cave and the microclimates that are created by devices that are running at high processor speed with huge fans, to climate change itself, making it impossible to have the FIFA World Cup at its usual time because they are having it in Qatar, so they now need to have it in the winter and they also need to build a huge stadium using migrant labor, which is open air, and is going to be air conditioned to keep the temperature to 85 degrees. Why? What are we doing? My colleague, Lisa Parks, has this wonderful idea that she hasn’t really published about yet but has presented about which is, instead of talking about media we should be talking about energy-media matrices or an energy-media matrix. We should stop talking about a smartphone, but we should say “a lithium-ion battery powered smartphone,” or “a copper analog wire telephone” to have more specificity about not just media and devices but about how they’re powered and how they fit into the world.

NZ

‍Jason, I wanted to take this question of climate somewhere a little bit different. I keep going back to what you said of “critiquing it, conceptualizing it, talking about it to death, and building it” and how building it and living in it is impacted by this kind of future. The reality is very much present for me, living in Miami, where climate change is here. The tomorrow is also here. But they don’t stop building the high rises. There is a long history of displacement and there are displaced Indigenous communities right here in Miami. Their future is the present. That displaced future is the present. How does AI and the computational environments that you’re building in the communities you’re working with play in? We know that climate change is disproportionately going to affect marginalized communities and Indigenous territories, so when you think about working with youth and communities, what does that mean? It’s a messy question because it’s so big.

JEL

‍Yeah, it’s a big mess. What is the word for when non-Western countries say, “Wait a second. You guys used everything up and now you’re telling us that we can’t use resources to make the stuff we want?” It’s the same thing thinking about AI. Here we are, we’re working with some communities, like Hawaii, for instance, where the effects of climate change are very clear. It’s happening and you can see it. It’s not something abstract and over there. So what does it mean to be promoting the use of these technologies that are highly resource-intensive and built on these global supply chains that are exactly the kind of supply chains that the people who are working to revitalize Native Hawaiian food practices are trying to get away from? Eighty to ninety percent of Honolulu’s food is shipped in via container ships. At some level I don’t know if it’s reconcilable.

A big part of the reason we’re interested in the AI work is that AI has already been weaponized against our communities. We know this story, we’ve seen this happen with multiple other technologies coming from the West being used against us, so we don’t have time, I don’t believe, to figure out how to do everything ethically from top to bottom. One of the doctoral students with whom I work, Suzanne Kite, writes about this in her essay “How To Build Anything Ethically.” She’s been thinking about her art practice and how to make work and the technology for that work completely ethically and she’s come to the conclusion that you can’t do it. If you’re going to do it you’re just not going to get anything done on a human timescale. The ethical cycle considers every single moment from when you make a request to bring something out of the earth to when you make a request to put it back in. It’s completely overwhelming to actually operate ethically everywhere along that cycle if you want to make something happen in the world now. And one of the reasons why we feel like we need to make it happen now is because of this weaponization. Our data is being stolen. It’s being used against us in the form of DNA. It’s being used against us in the form of surveillance—all the different ways you guys are very familiar with. I don’t think we have time to get it all right ethically, the whole stream. So then it’s a question of where do we want to really work out what it means to be ethical, so that it becomes part of this longer arc. Where are you going to intervene? This is something I learned from the interaction designer Brenda Laurel, when I worked with her Interval research in the 1990s, who would talk about how daunting it is to think about actually moving the needle on the scale of a whole society. At that time she was interested in really thinking through how to change a game industry that was convinced that the only games really worth playing are the games that fourteen-year-old boys want to play.

AYC

‍I know. Purple Moon.

JEL

‍Exactly. Rest in peace. One of my earliest jobs was building a video analysis tool for the interviews that were done with hundreds of girls as research for Purple Moon. Brenda would talk, think about what it takes to move the needle, and then think about how to move the slider. She would say, “Just think about how many sliders there are. You can’t move all the sliders all at once, you just can’t. There’s no way for anybody to do that. So pick a slider and work on that slider and support other people who are working on the other ones where you can.” The slider I’m choosing is computational technology. We’re going to try to make it in a way that serves our communities better and we’re ultimately going to try to make it in a way that our ways of engaging with the world are actually embedded in how it’s made and how it operates, because until we start doing that we’re going to continue to be subject to this weaponization, and we’re going to forego some of the really positive things that these technologies are capable of doing either because we’re afraid of it being used against us or we’re ignored because our population is so small. It’s a triage situation, it’s not an ideal situation.

I’m involved with a couple projects now in Hawaii that are really looking at how to bring together traditional knowledge holders about soil, or about the coastline, with scientists coming out of traditional Western practice who use computational tools to analyze soil and the coastline. How do we bring these groups of people into conversation with each other so that the communities can expand their knowledge around these computational practices? Not that the computational practices can cherrypick little bits of method and knowledge from the Indigenous people, which is what’s happening now in the best cases, but how do we bring those computational practices into our knowledge frameworks, so that they can be enacted in the ways that we think are productive and supportive of our vision. It’s super hard and it’s super fraught, and getting the ethics to match is very difficult, but I think, at the end of the day for me, it’s one of those things where the alternative is to do nothing. To just be frozen by the enormity of the problem or the purity of your vision. I’m a big believer in pure visions. I think they’re very powerful and very good at clarifying what it is that you’re fighting for, but I am not a supporter of people who believe that all our actions must be pure.

NZ

‍I really appreciate this idea of what to do in a complex world when urgency is the thing at hand. In the arts we think about finding the critical potential to intervene in systems, but it often ends up feeling overwhelmingly complex. Everything is so difficult. And so lowering the expectation, not lowering in the sense of making it less important, but lowering the expectation of tackling it all at once and instead picking the button that could be applied to so much of the way in which we think critically. I really appreciate that.

You both have spoken from the angle of resources, but I also want to think about it through the angle of visualization. A lot of the images we engage with and consume through gaming and digital environments of the future already are dystopian. Can you talk a bit about the role of images, image making, and imagining the future within the context of climate crises?

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AYC

‍I’m teaching an undergrad seminar right now on modeling and media, and we’re doing our week on climate. I did not intentionally schedule it at the same time as COP26 (2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference), but that just worked out. I’m throwing all this stuff at them this week, everything from hockey-stick graphs to more fancy general circulation model visualizations from NOAA and NASA to photographs, documentary clips, and games that simulate climate at different scales, from orbit or at the level of geological features, so they’re really seeing a media gamut of approaches to climate modeling. It’s an open question to them in terms of what they find most effective or efficacious. What does each form provoke in them as a feeling? Does anything spur them to action? These are very broad open-ended questions. We have yet to conclude the week, so I don’t know what the result will be, but I do think I want them to investigate the different affordances in consuming these and sometimes being invited to participate as an actor that’s making choices and seeing the results play out in something like an interactive simulation. Does that potentially create something more long-lasting? Is it about graphical verisimilitude, which is something that I’ve argued against, that doesn’t necessarily need to be there? There are other ways to create connection. These are all important formal questions as well as ethical questions.

JEL

‍I’m not sure where to start. Going back to the early AbTec work, that was very much about representation. It was about the power of seeing yourself and your community, as opposed to not seeing it or seeing a distorted image of it. But I guess the reason why I’m having difficulties is self-evident. I remember being at GDC (Games Developers Conference), I think it was the year after we did the first Hawaii workshop, and I presented a talk about the workshop with my Concordia colleagues Pippin Barr and Rita Kaled, and Noelani Arista from University of Hawai‘i. Part of the weird thing about Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace and the Skins workshops is that neither Skawennati nor I are game people. We don’t make games, we don’t study games, games are not our professional subject in any way. That was just an aside.

AYC

‍She makes avatars, though.

JEL

‍She does, yeah.

AYC

‍I remember that SLSA (Conference for Literature, Science, and the Arts) in Toronto.

JEL

‍Okay, yeah, nice.

We were with a couple of the folks from our Skins workshops, just walking around the floor of GDC, looking at all the booths hawking upcoming games. At some point we all hit this point of nausea about the dystopia of it all. I came out of it feeling like the world is doomed. We know that if we fill our visual field repeatedly with a certain kind of imagery it seeps into our lives and our imaginings of what reality is now and certainly what the realities of the future might be. It’s so interesting to me—this goes back to what you were saying earlier, Alenda—this spectacular failure of imagination that we see on an ongoing basis. I think about it in terms of VR. Still one of the best VR pieces out there is the piece that Char Davies made in 1995. Char’s a painter and you feel like you’ve stepped into this amazing painterly world that is an expression of her imagination. It’s tangentially related to reality but very much exceeding it at the same time. Thirty years later, everybody’s all hot and bothered about how realistic things can be. Wow, really? That’s as imaginative as you can get, how well can we recreate reality? A big problem we have in general across these fields is that the people in control of the technology have zero fucking imagination. Watching friggin Mark Zuckerberg do his Metaverse–

AYC

‍Oh my gosh, Meta.

JEL

‍You’re just like, oh my god.

AYC

‍His avatar looked exactly like him.

JEL

‍Yeah, we’re gonna be stuck in Mark Zuckerberg’s world. Can you imagine how horrible that’s going to be? And it’s going to be horrible because he has no imagination. None of them do. This is the thing that drives me nuts about Silicon Valley—all this talk about creativity. I’m sorry, they’re boring as fuck. That goes back to the arts thing, why we need good artists around. In terms of visualizing climate, visualizing the future, we need people who can get us out of these ruts that you two have identified. Either it’s a future of unbridled extraction and dystopia, or it’s a future of, “Oh, everything’s going to be natural and we’re going to be one with nature.” Where are all the things that are in between, or that are interesting combinations of all that? It’s important that we see more of those.

NZ

‍Yeah, but also, how do we see these interesting combinations? Just thinking about arts and media infrastructure and the way in which these particular images circulate, the ones that reach the dominant visible channels aren’t always the interesting ones. So there’s a question about the lack of imagination on the creating side, sure, but there’s also a lack of imagination and access on the infrastructure side.

AYC

‍I totally agree that there’s a lack of imagination and that we should be celebrating abstract and impressionist uses of these technologies, but I get torn because I also want to push for some kind of specificity in the modeling of natural assets, because I’m so tired of seeing generic trees. I’m going to spend hours in this virtual world or environment. I don’t want to be able to tell that the same tree model got cut and pasted fourteen thousand times across the landscape. Maybe it’s not worth investing all the resources to get a real giant sequoia or real red fir or something like that, but at the same time, I kind of want that. I want digital morphogenesis. I want assets that actually grow and react to their spaces and that aren’t just plug and play readymades. I have this back and forth all the time because I do want some kind of realism and accuracy and fidelity to the world, but I also recognize that that’s not all that needs to be done or that that doesn’t have to be everything.

JEL

‍It’s this weird Frankenstein realism. It’s like, this plant looks cool and this tree looks cool and we’re going to put them together, but these things have never been within 5,000 miles of each other in the real world.

AYC

‍Exactly, and it’s all just modeling for the shot, so if you were able to walk behind the tree, there would be nothing there.

JEL

‍One of the powerful moments in the first Skins Workshop in Hawaii was when Noelani Arista, who was there as a cultural advisor and as a participant, saw one of the younger participants modeling a plant from Hawaii. She said, “I’m having these feelings.” And we were wondering why and she said, “I am so happy to see this plant from our place in a model of our place.”

AYC

‍I had this experience on an artist panel for FIBER in Amsterdam and it was the same thing where I was talking about the kinds of assets that are pre-made and available in digital libraries and they’re all primarily North American deciduous temperate products, and so I was like, “Why can’t I find a guava tree but I can find 12,000 different apple trees?” And then another person on the panel, Jeremy Kamal, was like, “Oh yeah, why isn’t there a mulberry tree? Those were really important in my youth because they were a food source where I grew up.” And then Pinar Yoldas was like, “Yeah, they’re very common in Turkey where I’m from.” It’s really fascinating, these questions of representation and culture.

NZ

‍I don’t know how real estate speculation works where you all live, but in Miami, these images also matter because they affect the built environment. We have buildings with landscapes that are foreign to here, all because those are the plants that got modeled, rendered, and ultimately reproduced over and over again. Obviously that is not all landscape architects or people working on these environments, but you can see how renderings and modeling technologies become a part of the physical world.

We’re coming up to the close of this and I wanted to ask, who is building these environments and influencing the infrastructure behind them? Who has access to these technologies and the importance of putting people in those positions? I often think about the emancipatory potential in the making of images, of designing digital technologies, and how that is impacted by the people who are building them and coding them and, ultimately, what that means for tomorrow. I mean the how from a really practical sense. How do communities and people who are already marginalized gain access to these so that their futures are not foreclosed?

JEL

‍It’s a really tough question. We try to act as a conduit between the university, which has substantial resources, and the communities that we work with. That’s been central to our mission from the very beginning. Sometimes we do it well, sometimes we don’t necessarily do it well, but I think it’s very difficult for communities to do it completely internally, because they don’t necessarily have access, and they don’t necessarily have capacity, so finding people who will work with them to support their goals is key. For people who are in positions like mine, that are tapped into substantial resources, we can work with communities. It’s challenging. I always try to clarify and be transparent that I’m there for my reasons, too, because that’s always true. We work with the community to develop things that, if we do our job right, meet their needs, but I’m not a social worker, and I try to be really honest about it. One of the things that Skawennati and I do when talking with potential collaborators is we talk about what we do, we talk about what they need, and how we can match them together. We also talk explicitly about what we get out of it for our research and creative goals. What do I, as an academic, get out of this? I get the satisfaction of working with the community in a way that is productive for them. But I also get publishing possibilities and data and interesting projects for our student research assistants to work on. We don’t pretend that we are only there for the community because we are also there for the other things that we’re trying to do at the same time, finding these conduits from high-resource contexts to low-resource contexts is key, and it happens in all kinds of different ways and all different areas.

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AYC

‍There’s a lot in terms of access, not just in the last mile problem of infrastructure delivery, which I think is a huge thing, but also the cultures around it. Lisa Nakamura has written about, especially within gaming but in internet culture in general, this kind of rhetoric of digital nativism of, “We were here first.” And if you’re a woman or a person of color and you’re trying to play on an Xbox, you’re an interloper, that sort of rhetoric is being deployed. I also see it playing out in these community policing registers that we could work to make more inclusive, whether it’s in games discourse or elsewhere. And also getting our students to recognize how they’ve been treated as digital natives without really having any sort of wisdom about the tools they use on a daily basis. Whenever I can, I push against that grain and make them do things like read end-user license agreements, which is always really popular as an assignment.

NZ

‍Oh my god, so much fun.

AYC

‍So much fun. Or Terms of Service or Terms of Use. Pick your flavor. Even better, all three.

JEL

‍That’s awesome. I want to take your classes.

AYC

‍That would be awesome.

NZ

‍She left that for the end, though. She didn’t sell that part at the beginning. She totally snuck in the Terms of Service.

AYC

‍Oh yeah, the bait and switch. Digital theory. And the first assignment is you get to read a EULA (end-user license agreement).

NZ

‍I think all of this speaks to the importance of the tools we need in order to build those protocols, whether it’s the knowledge or the experience. Jason, I think it’s really important that you mentioned the trade-offs. Maybe we can’t predict what they are, but at least we can recognize that they’re there.

JEL

‍I think it’s important, at least from the Indigenous perspective, although I don’t know how other communities feel, and I don’t really know what my community feels, except for the people I talk to in my community. It’s also very different this time because we have people in positions who actually have some agency, which was simply not the case with prior technologies. So this is one of the examples I use with research assistants in particular, because most of my research assistants are BIPOC, when there’s despair about whether things are changing or not, and, as you can imagine, I’ve had a number of those conversations over the last two years. I tell them: There is movement. There is improvement. There is increased agency. It’s a long way from what we want or what we need, and we shouldn’t have to fight for it, but if we dismiss the fights that took place to get us the increased agency we have then we’re doing a dishonor to the people who did that fighting for us.

NZ

‍I don’t want to take any more of your time even if I have like eight more questions. Thank you both for your generosity and your patience.

JEL

‍Thank you, I really appreciate the opportunity to dig a bit into Alenda’s work, and yours too, Natalia. Thank you for your time and bringing us together. This was a great conversation.

AYC

‍This was great. It was nice to meet you both, and hopefully I’ll get to see you at some point if we ever travel again.

NZ

‍Under other circumstances, this would have been in person.

JEL

‍Now it would be time for a cocktail.

AYC

‍Next time. Well, it’s 4:30 where I’m at.

NZ

‍Cocktails before the talk.

JEL

‍Oh yeah. That, too.