Test. Test test. Test. Test test. What are the questions we pose, and who is not a part of the Training Data set, right . And so, you know, i think a lot about, going back to vision and going back to vision as a way of recognition, and think about simone browns way, in dark matters and how lantern laws were used to make visible the black face, and how when you think about our turn towards bio metric technologies, thats another mode of surveillance in making visible black and brown faces, and i think we have to call into question whether or not we want to be recognized within these systems and i think were likely going to talk about that, where she does well in her book, and to those are the kind of questions i kind of toy with when you think about race and technology, and just the ways in which it is operationalize, both as a heristic and the kinds of choices. I will briefly add to, that im glad you brought up simone browns work in dark matters, excellent text, to think about the way in which blackness is used, resisted and constituted by surveillance technology, and its always interesting to like have these conversations amongst academics and Community Activists as well, because i feel like there is such a, an understanding and a nodding to yes, absolutely, right, we need to be having these conversations about how race, as a technology, gets us to see, you know, power differently, and also gets us to see ways forward towards some kind of Restorative Justice or projects, political projects of liberation. But its frustrating because these are the kinds of concepts that at least in my experience, doing work with Police Officers, that the institution of Law Enforcement not only cant see, but that its very, its very constitution is dependent upon being blind to the ways in which they are producing race in these way, right . And producing the very conditions that they claim they want to stop, right . That they are here to do, you know, to do equitable policing, and to do Community Policing, and to be there for the community, and to serve and protect, and i, even as i say that, i want to make one point clear at least for me, that i think is often a difficult one to make but for me it is true, which is that, its not the argument that, you know, oh, a few, there are only a few rotten apples in the bunch or whatever, but its the idea from at least talking to officers, what they, many of them believe that what they are doing, right, is good, and that their practices are good, and its hard to have a conversation with them that gets anywhere close to this kind of, you know, conceptual and political discussion about the production of race and racialized bodies, that theyre part of every single day, that they put on their uniform, and get into their patrol cars, and police the street, right, and Police People of color, right . And so i think that theres, that at least for me is like the struggle in my work, is how to have these kinds of conversations with the people that are doing the work on the ground, right, theyre sort of like the very first line of, not the first line of defense, thats not the right metaphor, but theyre the sort of first people that communities come into contact with that, you know, you could flip a coin, is that person who is being stopped going to enter the criminal Justice System forever, be let go and be freed, whatever, right . I think that these conversations with racist technology, are so important, for the work of policing, and yet its a very difficult one to have, because it goes against the very, the very conceptual like beginnings of policing. I want to follow up with that, so i think its important to understand or consider rather than whether or not we recognize how we are imburkated in the production of race, we are, on whatever side of that and since we want to talk about, at least to some degree, interventions and resistance on this, in this discussion, how do you think that the cup watch groups that you work, with and lands edge that you work, with how do you think these organizations are understanding whether implicitly or explicitly how theyre subverting those narratives, how theyre using this production of race to try to subvert that. And their understanding of how theyre being produced as racialized subjects, how are they attempting, to or hopefully successfully successfully intervening in that production of that was a real long question. I think one of the best ways that i could approach that, that multilayered question, and also the question that came before, is through really the lens of an artist, of a community artist, and again, and thinking how culture production, and how art can be part of that conversation, in terms of s subverting, the subversion of race, the question that can be put forth, the reframing of race, and it is not new ground that artists are exploring and traversing, it is definitely a tradition that has been going on for quite some time, and it is something that i have always been thinking about, like how, like those histories can be much more visible and accessible, to not only other artists, but also educators and scholars and activists, because here, you know, here is another way of sort of having a conversation with community, having a conversation with policy makers, having another conversation with educators and whatnot, and so i mean thats something that i just want to broadly, you know, put to the table, is i think that art has always been subverting sort of those things, and so in terms of the work that i do at lands edge, but also in terms of the work that i do individually as an artist, im thinking, looking back again, at what i mentioned, much earlier, on sort of my creative explorations on futurism and how it is with indigenous and afrofutist sort of ideologies and i will bring in another artist, musscov. Poet, harjo, who coined the term skin thinking and skin thinking has various layers, of needing intellectual sovereignty and how skin thinking summons readers and viewers and audience members and Community Members to enjoy not only pleasurable levels of cognitive dissonance, lets say in genres, because im a writer, in genres of Science Fiction and fiction, and in art, the embodiment of art, and i think that is something that gets lost here, with ones connection to ones body, the detachment of ones body, where does the intimacy and spirituality go when this is this disembodiment and continuing to invest in the commitment to embodiment, fusing bodies with our intellects, connected with materialities as a way to sort of map, as a mapping to the next world, and i know im talking like sort of conceptually, but i guess thats the first thing that comes to my mind with the question you asked. So thats something im em more, im exploring. We can move on. So i would really like to hear an anecdote, actually, and weve heard a little bit about this, but i would love to hear an anecdote from each of you, or more than one if you have some to give, maybe hearing from your experience as a self professed story teller im starting to really i will never say it again. I called myself that as a joke but i feel like that is now being put into the public record. Please scratch that from the public record. In your career, your previous career, with youtube, and christina working with the police, and essentially i would love to hear your perspectives on working with these disparate groups that are coming at this issue from much different sort of arenas and perspectives. Something that speaks to you, specifically, interventions, and resistance, as we understand ourselves, in that racialized space you were referring to earlier. Yes, so, i mean an anecdote that really kind of helped me make the story to move to academia full time actually happened when i was working in San Francisco and my client at the time was a pretty large wellknown tech company, and an individual who was part of the, like the clients team, had come up with a new app which commodified dating online, which is otherwise a free service that we all engage in every day, and we can imagine who the target audience is, and who is being exploited in the process of this kind of product being launched in the public sphere, right . Well, low income communities, most of them given San Franciscos population were homeless people, right . And i took huge issue with that. And i think that much of my work has moved towards really interrogating innovation culture, and how we in the public sphere really understand and accept convenience and efficiency under the guise of innovation in ways that we really exploit and undermine kind of the integrity of the lives of marginalized communities. And i also think it is really telling that it really fends , depends on who i tell this story to whether or not they take issue with it, right, and i think that really illuminates for me that, you know, previous panels talked about the kind of seduction of technology, the seduction of datadriven algorithmic Decision Making and the ways in which it kind of benefits our lives, but i think we tend to not care enough about, or not think through enough the ways in which these kinds of technologies exploit marginalized communities and also mighting used or implemented in more kind of sinister contexts, so if that anecdote makes me think of the ways that facial recognition is starting to be launched as part of airport checkin, but what does that mean for, you know, or what does that mean for resistance when it gets implemented as sort of ectv, and have we normalized those kind of aspects of culture, and so you know, in our drive for innovation, and our drive for kind of profitcentric conditions, really being able to create a product that both fulfills our needs but at the same time kind of drives business forward, i really question, i posted this through to all really think through the stakes of who self plated in the process, what is implemented in that process and to what end are we using and adopting these technologies. Theres a long history of using story telling, right, to speak back to power, and im thinking here, at least when im using story telling, im sort of thinking of it through the lens of performance and theater because thats the, those are the sorts of embodies strategies that my work thinks with, right . And you know, im thinking here of augusta, feeder of the oppressed, and staging interventions that speak back to power, and to be issues of disempowerment can be a way to really create new spaces for imagining life otherwise, as it is in the current moment. And so thats the sort of hope and sort of idealized position from which i am hoping to work with, you know, these communities of people who are overly policed, right, in san diego, toward writing scripts for police training, as alternative kinds of stories that police can interact with, not only when they are academy cadet, right, before theyre even in the field, but also working police pa trol officers to come and interact with these scenarios. And right now, theres two sorts of ways in which were imagining this, one would be sort of the typical scenario training where it is basically a stage theater intervention but the other component of this project is to script and then film these scenarios and then program them into a Virtual RealityTraining Simulator at ecsds qualcomm institutes so im working with a few commuter scientists there to imagine what it would look like and also because it is another tool that officers use when they are being trained in the community. They have these 360 or 180 simulated environments that they enter into, and the only tool that they are given in terms of like a physical object is like a decommisioned firearm thats sort of loaded with a co 2 capsules or whatever, and thats the sort of tool that they are ushered into using when theyre looking at a Virtual Reality scenario that they are in front of, right . So sort of very problematic and limiting training scenario, because all of these simulated, all of these simulations which end with the inevitability you draw your firearm and shoot at someone and hopefully they didnt shoot at you first. And i will give you two anecdotes, one is that i had the pleasure of going to the national Law Enforcement museum which is only a couple of miles thataway which opened in october of 2018 whichdy not know existed until i came here and very pleased to find that that existed and i encourage everyone to go and see this museum, because its sort of illustrates the way that the institution of policing is staging, the way that they want the public to see them and what they have for the very first time for the public is they have a Training Simulation that you can use, thats been donated to this museum, and so i had a chance to go and try this the other day, with three other people that were there, it was like a family of three. And we were invited to sort of step into a scenario, strap on a belt, and engage in like three scenarios that they geared up for us with this software. And all to say that for all of us being nonLaw Enforcement, its very strange thing to step into these stories. And then find that the narratives are within you, right . Like the way that you step into a scenario, and you already know the script of what youre supposed to say, the way that youre supposed to yell at, you know, a black man holding a gun in the scenario, in order to make the scenario end successfully, and the tension that one feels in doing that, right, especially if someone who is doing a critical work on policing and committed to doing work with Community Members who are visualizing and filming police to hold them accountable. And the last anecdote i will give briefly is that i am suggest can using performance not only because i think that it is a useful tool but because it is a tool that police are using themselves to not only train each other, but to, it might also be a way for them to rethink their own practices. And so there, i had a friend who was an officer, he is still an officer with El Cajon Police department, and he had encountered, we were talking together, and he had encountered something that happened the day before, when he was at work, that like really upset him. And when i was interviewing him, i was like well, you know, have you ever thought about maybe writing that into a script, you know, as a kind of exercise for yourself, about what went wrong and what you wish could have been done differently, i didnt think anything of it, hes not going to do this, right, and then he wrote it and he gave it to me, and i have it, and so he wrote this script about what happened the day before and what he wished had been done differently and then he went to his shift meeting, the next day, and the shift meeting is what officers go to, before they start their day, right, they go and talk about what happened the day before, and he brought, and he printed it out, and the sergeant there, who was in charge of these officers for this particular shift was like, all right, officer, you know, pseudonym, everybody read a role, so all of these officers sat around the table and performed this scene, and you know, that illustrated to me that theres a way in which performances not only already there in policing but is a tool they are willing to think with and might be a way to collaborate toward imagining, you know, Police Violence that resistance is to Police Violence and to racist policing. Thank you. We have about ten minutes, or ten minutes left, so i would love to open this up to questions. It looks like we have a few already. If someone could please pass them a mic. We have one back here actually. Did you have a question . Okay. My name is shareason, i have two questions. Two questions about the whole visual part of this. We have seen from what you said from king to now, Sandra Blands personal video came out after the fact, right, after the case was over, after she was already dead, we also have the case recently, a young boy, who had a Police Officer yell gun in his face and he is videotaping this, on facebook live, right, and part of our problem is we are watching these visuals, but the perception of the visuals is basically theres a concept that we are, this is the existence of brown and black lives, that even white people who gave this think this is the role for us, and that this becomes sort of a little bit of an acceptance of how were treated versus them. And so i do have a question in terms of that because there was another incident where kids, teens, mostly white, one black teen, a Police Officer came after that teen, the black teen, and the white teens sort of responded, and his reaction to the white teens versus the black teen was drastically different, in the moment, in the moment, and so i guess my question is about this performance piece, is there a way that we can show them how theyre performing in front of brown and black people, versus in front of white people, so they can see that there is some part of a difference in their own behavior. Not just for the narratives that theyre creating themselves, but also the narratives that we now see about the fact that they can tell one story, we tell our own story, and somehow their story still stands against the evidence of our own. Thank you so much for that question. That is an excellent point, right, and i think that this is beyond just getting officers to have different kinds of training to see differently, but i think that there is space for them, and for us, you know, or me, right, as someone who is engaged in this project, to have those discussions with them. But heres at least what i have experienced as like a mind boggling or deeply frustrating issue, is that when i went to the museum that i just mentioned, they have an entire exhibit dedicated to Community Policing, right, which is a sort of move in the 1980s to bring officers out of the, you know, patrol car, and like on to the street, with communities of color, to really like build collaboration, right, and its so, that narrative that, you know, police, policing are understanding of the fact that racialized violence is a thing and theyre going to be held accountable, the fact that it is im bedded in that museum, and so neatly tied up with a bow is incredibly frustrating because it tells this very neat a