During Pioneer Works' Second Sundays series, Silas and I co-facilitated a hybrid workshop as part of the Dark Matters project by Johann Diedrick. From the series description: 

This Second Sundays, we are celebrating Dark Matters. Mozilla recently announced funding for Black artists who use art to spotlight how AI can reinforce—or disrupt—systems of oppression. One of the eight winning projects was Dark Matters by Alumni Resident Johann Diedrick.

Thanks to the support of Mozilla, we imagine what a future would look like if voice interfaces worked better for Black people/Black speech in this co-creation workshop. Participants will use this time to answer questions like, “What would we want to be made possible? How could we redesign these systems for us, by us? What would we hope for them to accomplish? How would we want to use these technologies for our own needs, wants, and desires?”

The goal of this session was for participants to reflect on the presentations heard earlier in the day and hold a conversation around Black speech and language by generating catalogues of words related to tech fails relating to AI wrt Black people, Black vernacular language, qualities of Black speech, and words that belong to Black vocabularies / slang / parts of speech.  Moving forward, they were invited to generate stories that force us to more deeply consider how these technologies operate in the world today and how they might if constructed differently by constructing madlibs, inserting an element of play and absurdity into a serious set of problems.

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