Data Bodies and Arab Futurisms with Laila Shereen Sakr

In this episode, we talk to digital media theorist and artist Laila Shereen Sakr, who also performs under the name VJ Um Amel. We discuss her work making data about the outer world both visible and emotional. We explore what Laila calls the "surveyed and targeted Arab data body" and the incredible work she does creating Arab futuristic video games that both represent Arab cultures and project them into the future. We hope you enjoy the show.

Laila Shereen Sakr is a media artist and Associate Professor at UC Santa Barbara where she is also a faculty affiliate in the Art Department, Feminist Studies Department, Media Arts and Technology Department, Center for Responsible Machine Learning, Center for Information Technology and Society, and the Center for Middle East Studies. Her art exhibitions like Capital Glitch (Qualcomm Institute, 2021) and publications like the book Arabic Glitch (Stanford University Press, 2023) explore algorithmic systems and critical AI, using glitches aesthetically and as a metaphor to reveal global disruptions and interconnections. As VJ Um Amel (moniker or video jockey “Mother of Hope”), she combines artistic innovation with critical inquiry, using data like clay to transform how we understand our contemporary worlds and future possibilities. 

At UCSB, she co-directs Wireframe, a studio promoting collaborative theoretical and creative media practice with investments in global, social, and environmental justice. She also co-founded the Creative Critical AI Undercommons (2024), the Autonomous Futures (2024), the R-Shief media system (2009), and the D.C. Guerrilla Poetry Insurgency (2003). As both artist and scholar of emergent media, she writes prolifically in venues like Minnesota University Press’ Debates in Digital Humanities series and Middle East Critique, develops machine learning (ML) software and natural language processing (NLP) analytics of social media, and is developing an Arab futuristic video game about liberation.

Reading List:

Arabic Glitch: Technoculture, Data Bodies, and Archives - Laila Shereen Sakr

"When Data Bodies Become Targets: New Risks in a Networked World" - Laila Shereen Sakr

, Tech Policy Press.

Designing Culture:The Technological Imagination at Work - Anne Balsamo

The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms - edited by Taryne Jade Taylor, Isiah Lavender III, Grace L. Dillon, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay.

Arab Future Tripping - Laila Shereen Sakr

Data Feminism - Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein

Transcript:

Kerry: Hi, I'm Dr. Kerry McInerney. Dr. Eleanor Drage and I are the hosts of The Good Robot podcast. Join us as we ask the experts: What is good technology? Is it even possible? And how can feminism help us work towards it? If you want to learn more about today's topic, head over to our website, www.thegoodrobot.co.uk, where we've got a full transcript of the episode and a specially curated reading list compiled by every guest. We love hearing from listeners, so feel free to tweet or email us. We’d also really appreciate you leaving us a review on your podcast app. Until then, sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.

Eleanor: In this episode, we talk to digital media theorist and artist Laila Shereen Sakr, who also performs under the name VJ Um Amel, about making data about the outer world visible and emotional. We explore what Layla calls the surveyed and targeted Arab data body, and the incredible work she does creating Arab futuristic video games that represent Arab cultures, and project them into the future. We hope you enjoy the show.

Kerry: Thank you so much for joining us. We've been looking forward to this interview for absolutely ages. We're so delighted to get the chance to chat. So just to kick us off, could you tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, and what's brought you to thinking about feminism, gender, and technology?

Laila: Thank you for having me. It's a real pleasure, and I really appreciate this opportunity. My name is Laila Shereen Sakr. I also go by VJ Um Amel. That's my cyborg moniker that I use for my art productions. I have been working in technology since the late nineties. I built my first website then, got involved online in what were called chat rooms, IRC chat rooms, and I met Aaron Schwartz, who I was just noticing he had a birthday who passed, who, who built Reddit, and he was the kid, he was 12 years old when I met him, who built the RSS feed. RSS is the ability to syndicate websites and org, and it's like the foundation for a lot of data analysis.

Very early on, it got very exciting to be in that moment was extremely exciting, but quickly as corporations took over the platforms and started building, we noticed that what was possibly a liberatory tool had been used for, exploitation, more capital production through the exploitation of people who use the tools. And so a feminist approach to this work seems very fundamental and important. And I've been involved with feminist techies, or I think that techies who come at this work from a feminist perspective, do it very differently. And I can talk about that in more detail.

Eleanor: In our last episode, we interviewed the creator of Ladymouth, Sarah Ciston, and they were talking about this chatbot that goes into male rights subreddits and quotes Audrey Lorde. So if you haven't listened to that, it's great.

Of course, Reddit has become this incredibly ugly place and the numbers are vast. I was just writing about it just now, hundreds and thousands of these misogynists just on these, like one or two different forums. But let's take a utopian turn. What is good technology? Is it even possible? And how can feminism help us work towards it?

Laila: Okay, so that's an interesting question.

Theoretically, technology is neither good or bad inherently, but it doesn't exist without a human building it and using it. And therefore it becomes good or bad. Okay. But it is the human being and the human being’s motives and reasons and uses of the technology that then can, designate it as good or bad.

Eleanor: What is technology pre the human then? Surely technology is always political.

Laila: Okay, here I'll give you an example. Twitter. Okay?

Twitter was good when activists around the world used it for activism and digital, getting the world out like Black Lives Matter was a movement that began really through the hashtag Black Lives Matter online. And without Twitter, that community couldn't have come together. The Arab Spring of 2011 couldn't, the technology played a very essential role in bringing everybody together.

And that same technology, Twitter today is a misogynist platform that is actually being used to support under Elon Musk, the right wing American public mainly, but globally also anybody who's more authoritarian, minded globally. So that's one platform. It's the same platform. It's Twitter X, but depending on how it's managed it can be used differently. That's what I mean.

But I think it's important to think that way because if we think of like the tool, is this good or bad? It's not this that's good or bad. This is a bunch of other questions that we need to ask. And that's my point. I avoid using those terms of good and bad because what's good for one person is bad, could be bad for another.

Anne Balzamo talks about it in Designing Culture that she talks about the double edged sword of technology. I think when we're looking at technology it's related to the body. So the technology is an expansion or extension of the body always. Why do we use technology? Because we ourselves need a tool to expand ourselves.

Kerry: And I really want to come to this question you're raising around like embodiment and technology, because this is one of your major areas of expertise is this idea of the data body. And so in your book that you mentioned, Arabic Glitch, you talk about how in the U.S., the data body is made up of all the different pieces of data from like your social security number, your GPA from college, your driver's license record maintained by the state, Facebook feed, like all bits and pieces. And you say, and this is a quote, So much clout that you cannot buy a house unless your data body is normalized in economic systems.

So could you tell us a bit more about the data body? So what is it? Why does it matter? And then crucially, how does it relate to state power?

Laila: I'll just take apart the concept of data body and I put the word body in there, right? Data is data. But I add the word body because I think it's very critical to understand that this data represents a body. We often forget in all of our mathematical calculations that all this data is actually impacts, severely impacts, a human being. This is also VJ Um Amel is related to the data body. VJ Um Amel is my data body.

I conceive of all of us as cyborgs. We are all cyborgs. If we engage in this work to some extent, our bodies again, are extended into this into data. And that's how we as individuals and sovereign individuals within our political and economic systems exist.

Now, the data body, I think you described it very well. It is all the data records that states and institutions mainly have kept on us. They've existed before the digital. So we can consider, there are analog records. Those are also data, right? They're analog, but they're data and they're data bodies.

And this has been going on since the age of the enlightenment, right? Calculating and keeping records of people, calories and whatever. Depending on what state, it's going to act differently, and the, my argument is that all of these institutions and nation states let's use the data to control or give access to people in and out of different life.

Let me pull back to this exact moment today in 2024. I just wrote an op ed for Tech Policy Press. You can take a look at it where I make the point to say that the Arab data body today is a target. Our WhatsApp history is being, is what has been used by the Israeli state in order to identify who might be Hamas and who might not be. And  that was a software called Lavender AI, which you must've read about.

And then accordingly, once the AI has determined that individual is a Hamas sympathizer or Hamas person then through, by looking at their WhatsApp feeds their only their data records, then what they are able to do is  go in and legally by international law, because they have now identified this person as an enemy of war, they can go and bomb the home of that individual killing. Not only that individual, but their whole family, right? And the whole building.

This is one mechanism that has been used today. Groups of people who are under surveillance, Palestinians in Israel, like Blacks in the United States, the state has more records on them, because they're under surveillance. And therefore, their data bodies can be targeted more easily. These nation states are able to collect and get information about each and every one of us to such a deep and detailed level that they're able to identify us and where we are and what we're doing and what we're saying.

And then according to whatever political or economic, larger issues are at play, then the state can carry those out. I know people who've been in jail for 10 years now because of something they've tweeted in different countries. And my point in that op ed I wrote for Tech Policy was that these did this system of states and institutions collecting data and then creating data bodies or really using them to target and identify and surveil bodies, human bodies, that this system is part of global capitalism.

And that we think it's happening over there, but it could easily, and actually today under Trump in the United States, more than likely will happen here, especially with Elon Musk at his side. A lot of these tools were a lot of the sort of surveillance mechanisms are mechanisms that the FBI and the CIA have been using here in the United States. It's just not as flagrant.

I think it's really critical that policy, policymakers, politicians, and citizens understand how their data is being used by the state to make decisions about right now, about killing or not killing decisions that are made within the framework of war, which I would say is an international war.

Eleanor: Yeah. We all need to be taking more seriously the things that we think are happening over there are very much happening on our doorstep. One way that you have gone about improving AI literacy or data literacy to me is that you've conducted these incredible sentiments analysis of data about early 21st century uprisings. So notably the Twitter data from the 2011 Arab uprising. And you call this emotional data. And of course it is. It's data about emotions. And you visualize it in really cool ways. So you can see these changes and emotional trends in the data and these are demonstrated by changes in form and color.

And data you show is something that a computer can read. That's how it's defined in your work. And it's something that can be transformed and analyzed, and which imposes encoding restraints on representation. So maybe you can explain that for us. It imposes encoding constraints on the way something is represented. So can you tell us about representing phenomena as data, as objects and features by making them countable and manageable and knowable and shareable in a way that is crucially, emotionally meaningful to the public.

Laila: I love this question. Thank you for that. We have this idea that data is part of data science, key word science, and that the only way to understand data is through science and I take issue with that.

But unfortunately I think that's the dominant way of people of thinking globally. I know a lot of humanists, brilliant minds who are, Oh, I don't do that. Oh, I don't know. Oh, that's outside of my purview. Oh, data. Oh no, that's like math.

And they just all of a sudden break down and they're like, I can't, I can't compute, I can't analyze, I can't try to understand what it means because it is a different discipline, right? I find that to be unnecessary and that's why I push for the literacy.

But I will also say that I also don't see data as an objective truth at all.There's so much data out there. You will always find what you're looking for. It is a rhetorical strategy that data science scientists use to make their arguments. You can use data in rhetorical manners.

That's the thing. People think that data is something that you only use for finding some objective truth, which is what the science, what science does. In the humanities, we have rhetorical thinking and that is our, that's critical thinking. And so I actually approach data like that.

Like it is the clay in my art, right? As an artist, I see data as the clay. It's the paint. It's my paint and my brushes are made up of that. Now, my limits are the brush, right? I can only do so much depending on my brush. And that's where there are constraints. You were asking that question. The constraints come with the tools because it can only do so much.

If I have a thick brush, I'm not going to be able to do, it'd be very hard with a thick brush to do little points. Now to go to your question about the emotional data. So that's the art. That's where techniques in art production in video making and media production, media arts is a field.

And that's where we think these through very carefully in media arts. And that's where, that's my approach. And so you look at your data set. Let's just say you're looking at Sylvia Wynter's archives and the data gives you a story.

And then how do you tell that story? You do it just the way any filmmaker or any artist would do, color really careful motion. There's a plot. There's a narrative. And so you have to craft your narrative in a way that it reaches your audience.

And my goal is to make my audience feel like they are in, like they're watching a film. Not like they are reading a report with X and Y charts. No, that's not my goal. My goal is to make them hear a story. And in order to hear a story you need to make people feel, not just think.

And that's done through little fine things, color, motion, size, You know, you're creating a world for people to explore. And what does explore mean? It means that they're going to have an interaction. They're going to interact with it. And then they're going to have a mental and emotional feeling that they're going to walk away with. And that's what you're trying to build.

Eleanor: And this is what you do very beautifully in the game that you created Data Bodies. So it's an Arab futuristic game about liberation. It has companion bots and futuristic plants and beautiful white hummingbirds. And the government looks like a scarab beetle. You've got these slippery Dali- esque clocks. So tell us how you made it, why you made it and how you came up with these incredible characters.

Laila: This is actually what you saw is just a conception. It hasn't been built yet. So it's coming out now, hopefully by 2025, 2026. It's so it's on the way.

This came out of...I've been archiving social media since 2008.And that's like my, again, my paint my, my tools. And I, I archived a considerable amount of the Arab uprisings. In fact I would say that Arshif is one of the main resources for that particular historical moment.

And since then, for about 15 years, I've had this dream of...I just want to dive into, I literally want to physically, it goes back to the body, want to dive into it. First it was a VR world and then it became a game. I reached out to a colleague of mine, Susana Ruiz, and we are both co directors in this project. She's a game designer.

From that, we have spent the last three years meeting and with a whole team of people conceiving of this game. We were very concerned about how to handle the politics. And then before October 7th, 2023, all of what was done all before. We actually stopped in October, 2023.

We're picking it up again now because what we decided was we're building an Arab futuristic game. There's a lot of Afrofuturism. There's a lot of games, all parts of the world that conceive of the future, but there's a lack of Arab futurism. If you think about the an nihilism, the despair today among Arabs, you can only imagine how difficult it is to imagine the future, right?

So this is a very important I think, process. To imagine a future that is not devastation and apocalyptic. I think we could say that the Middle East right now is experiencing apocalypse. And so how can you even conceive of the future?

So there's such a, there was such a void and such a desperate need and such an excitement about creating an Arab futuristic game where the Middle East is the center of the world, that it's not a Western place. It's not Asia either, nor is it India where, again, there are works that really represent those cultures. And so I really wanted it to be Arab. And so I decided to make it Palestinian. This was before October 20 2023.

And that's because I think what it means to be Arab in the more recent past, when I say that, post Oslo, is really about the liberation of Palestine. That's been the case for a very long time, before 1948, but since 1948, there were many other historical moments that happened, but I would say that is what being Arab is about. And that's a debate. That's a debate. And so we built this squirrel where we modeled that, where you saw the clock.

That's the, that is modeled from the Palestinian library that is really there. Or was there.

And we wanted to bring up a lot of cultural nuances. There's a hummingbird, which represents Twitter, by the way, tweets. That's the hummingbird. It's because the tweets are actually in the game and the we have keys. Because for Palestinians, the right to return the key to the home. So there's a lot of keys throughout the game. And so we really imagined the future.

We worked with a team. We have a, we had an animator and a level designer from Cairo, two young women, amazing a technical director from Bahrain, we worked with we worked with people all over for several years to come up with this idea.

And so now we're finishing the script and we will be building the vertical slice and an MVP towards a prototype. And it will take us all the way until next year. So it's an exciting project. I'm, it's one of my most exciting projects that I'm working on right now, and we're really in the middle. So I'm happy that you see something exciting from what you've already looked at.

Kerry: Oh it sounds like such an amazing project but also the way that you articulate it as this like kind of futuristic imagination, this kind of future longing is really beautiful and as you said, so important as well. And it reminded me of the Routledge Handbook of Co futurisms, a book that was edited by Grace Dillon, who also came on the podcast to talk about indigenous futurisms.

As you were speaking, I was just thinking about how important these like kinds of articulations, not only of cross racial and regional and international solidarity have been really important when it comes to Palestine, but there's also been something in which people I think around the world have seen their pasts in the bombardment of Palestine, but it also trying to articulate these different futures or like when I see the campaigning and advocacy going on, say in East and Southeast Asian communities, like a lot of it, I think does link to the bombardment of Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos.

And I think people seeing the past of these particular communities and areas of the world reflected in what's happening in the Middle East today. And then also thinking about what does it mean for us to co articulate like a much better future free of this kind of violence and oppression. So I think the game is really exciting and a really beautiful way of grappling with a really difficult moment as well.

Laila: I want to say one more thing. Just that in the game, I have the main, can you play as you played as a historian going through old archives and you have a data body and you talk to your data body. The data body is a, is like a cyborg and then you find Batta. Batta is an Arabic word for duck and it's a bot. It's a cute little funny character. So I just wanted to tell you that there's a data body in there and there's Batta. Batta is my favorite. It's one of my favorite characters.

Kerry: Incredible. I also want to ask you finally about another kind of project that we have seen emerging, which is the Network of Arab Women in AI, is pioneering data research in relation to Middle Eastern and North African languages. And so we were wondering to you, what do you see as being like a feminist language based data set? And in what ways can you see large language models either embodying or not embodying these principles of data feminism?

Eleanor: And you've got the tough task of exploring this in two minutes.

Laila: Okay, so this is an amazing network and again, also pioneering new. We, what we did, so we spent a year doing research on this question. What is a feminist data set? We started with a book called Data Feminism by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein, which they articulate six key principles of data feminism, that it must be intersectional and be attentive to potential misogyny, and that it must rely on communities and within communities. And that it must explicitly avoid MTurk, mechanical Turk forms of crowdsourced labor, and to be careful about labor, and to consider labor in the process. We are also to work interdisciplinary as a collective and the collaboration and creation process is very important, and to teach data literacy. All of those are feminist principles that D'Ignazio and Klein mentioned in their book.

So what we did was we took those questions, we found like 50 Arabic data sets, and we took them, created a code book, and we just, and we had students help us, and we sapped and mapped what was feminist. Guess what? There was this much feminist data, zero, zilch. None of them, nothing got close to these principles. What came out of it was, I, we wrote a paper. We sent the paper's being looked at like several different places, and there'll be a there'll be a publication coming out soon.

There'll also be a manifesto that we're trying to put together. Several of our colleagues are in Lebanon right now, and so things have been a little difficult. Producing knowledge is not so linear. Not in this part of the world. But I'll just say that part of the new principles that we came up with are I'll just read them really quickly.

Misogyny isn't just toxicity.

It's harmful, specific, and deeply rooted.

Community centered data is not just data collection, but a process of collaboration and recognizing and valuing feminist labor, fair wages for data contribution.

The power of small models in big context. (This is very important.)

Small language models for local realities.

And everything's like large language. They want to eat up the world and represent everybody, but it's better to sometimes small languages models are good or more specific.

Rejecting exploitive crowdsourcing, which means find Really work with consent, transparency, and respect.

These are tenets of how we do our work, and collaboration as a praxis, community input at every stage of your process, and then of course teaching the technology and empowering communities through skill building.

These are feminist AI principles. We are writing about them, we are making them, we are exploring them, and we will be publishing these points.

Did I do that in two minutes?

Eleanor: That was incredible. We'd love to collaborate or come along. Listeners get in touch with both of us. And as always, there'll be a reading list to go with this episode of things that have been talked about today. Thank you so much for joining us. It's been an absolute pleasure.

Thank you.

Laila:  Thank you, Eleanor. Thank you, Kerry. It was a real pleasure to meet with you in this great conversation.

Eleanor: This episode was made possible thanks to the generosity of Christina Gaw and the Mercator Foundation. It was produced by Eleanor Drage and Kerry McInerney and edited by Eleanor Drage.

Image from Laila Shereen Sakr's Arab Future Tripping.