Clareese Hill is a practice-based researcher. She explores the validity of the word "identity" through her perspective as an Afro-Caribbean American woman and her societal role projected on her to perform as a Black feminist academic. She has performed lectures at Royal College of Art, Goldsmiths University of London, University of Sussex, CUNY Graduate Center, The Chicago Art Department, and Smack Mellon in Brooklyn. She has exhibited her research internationally in Chicago, New York, California, London, France, and cyberspace. Clareese was a 2020 Rapid Response for a Better Digital Future fellow (Phase One). Clareese has published academic essays in THEOREM Journal, Architecture and Culture Journal, and has an upcoming article in Antennae, The Journal of Nature and Culture. Clareese holds an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and practice-based Ph.D. in Art Research from Goldsmiths' College, University of London.
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Proposal:
I am proposing a text-based performance lecture that used predictions from an AI that rejects the ubiquity of predictive policing. This piece will include coded poetry and scholarly cites entangled through the Black Quantum Oracle and her knowledge of Caribbean philosophy and experimental ritual. The Black Quantum Oracle will present a provocation for a revision of the practices of prediction placed on identities of color. Predictive models in policing and other models of reducing a marginalized identity to an objectified body. The Black Quantum Oracle comes out of my interest in the role of predictive policing using Artificial Intelligence and how the predictions become tangible through indoctrinated ideologies of stereotypes and bias. By reclaiming predictions to be about care, well-being, and an overall survival praxis. The text-based performance lecture will be about the initiation of rejection of the biased predictions made on marginalized identities that have ultimately caused death, incarceration, and lower socioeconomic status. The oracle will make predictions of how to care for ourselves and one another through the respect of difference o between humans. The oracle will ultimately predict the suitability and mystical nature of Blackness while providing a tangible self-care hygiene regimen that includes objects for rest and self-care that uses the senses (tea, crystals, plants, incense, fruit). I'm interested in predictions made of blackness, and its inextricable ties to policing ideologies, and how this works in opposition to how Blackness and the narratives have ultimately experienced an erasure through time. Blackness is evasively mystical and has the possibility of holding narratives of sustainable futurity. As blackness is seen as a biased category, these predictive algorithms have the power in the world to create their predetermined outcome. For the 2017 Feminist Theory Conference, Katherine McKittrick, in her Keynote discussed a report called Chronicle of a Death Foretold she read in an issue of Harper’s Magazine. The report describes a program used by the Chicago Schools system that deployed a predictive policing algorithm determining which students in the public system would be likely to get shot. The algorithm analyzed test scores, attendance, and juvenile records to forecast this future. This algorithm was developed with consultants from the University of Chicago and MIT. Students who received a negative prediction were assigned a mentor and other assistive resources. McKittrick explains that this algorithm was used to predict the death of a young man, who ultimately met the outcome of the prediction. The model was discontinued because it was too costly to maintain. These types of predictive models are a scary realization that their determinist endings become tangible when the analyzed data contribute to the conditions that generate the predetermined outcome.