Wendy Hui Kyong Chun: Correlation and the 'breeding' of better futures

Part of the lecture series ‘Aesthetics of Transformation’

Curated by School for Transformation and in collaboration with AIL

In Discriminating Data, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun reveals how polarization is a goal—not an error—within machine learning-systems. These models, she argues, encode segregation, eugenics, and identity politics through their default assumptions and conditions. Correlation, which grounds big data's predictive potential, stems from twentieth-century eugenic attempts to “breed” a better future. Recommender systems foster angry clusters of sameness through homophily. Users are “trained” to become authentically predictable via a politics and technology of recognition. Machine learning and data analytics thus seek to disrupt the future by making disruption impossible.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Simon Fraser University’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media in the School of Communication and Director of the Digital Democracies Institute. She has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines and mutates in her research on digital media. She is author many books, including: Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT, 2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT 2011), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT 2016), and Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition (2021, MIT Press). She has been Professor and Chair of the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where she worked for almost two decades. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and International Fellow of the British Academy. She has also held fellowships from: the Guggenheim, the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), ACLS, American Academy of Berlin, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and Brown University. She has held visiting professorships from the University of Chicago, the Copenhagen School of Business, Lueneberg University, among other universities.

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About the series and information about all lectures

School for Transformation
AIL

Upcoming dates of the series:

13.05.2025, 12:00, Daniela Zyman: Counter-research and the Arts: A Thousand Other Ways of Knowing

27.05.2025, 18:00, Svitlana Matviyenko with Ramon Reichert: Synthetic Images | Dynamic Maps

10.06.2025, 18:00, Noit Banai with Amanda Holmes: The Paradoxes of Positionality: Diaspora Aesthetics and Transdisciplinary Research

17.06.2025, 18:00, Heather Davis with Monika Halkort: Plasctic Aesthetics

24.06.2025, 18:00, Miya Yoshida: Transvaluation: Reclaiming Time

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