Holding the Mello Trophy on Jazmin at the film set
It’s an honor to open Melodifestivalen (Mello) 2022, where I will ride on my PRE (Spanish) horse Jazmin with the Mello Trophy, through the landscapes of Sweden, to start off Sweden’s competitions for the Eurovision Song Contest. Jazmin and I have performed in various settings before, e.g. the opening of Cinema Queer‘s film festival in a circus tent in Stockholm, at the musical festival Gagnef Festivalen, riding through Stockholm City for Swedish/American artist Michele Pred’s art performance Radical Love Parade, and more. You can watch us riding in Mello at SVT Play: https://www.svtplay.se/video/33836762/melodifestivalen-2022/melodifestivalen-2022-deltavling-1-5-feb-20-00.
The ceremony was performed in Nackareservatet September 18th, 2021
It could not be described with justice through my words…
Instead, I will let the images give a glimpse of the magic that was created in the urban woodland by the artists, horses, and other human or non-human participants. Or, as a woman posted on her Facebook wall.
“Last Saturday an event appeared in my feed and even though I wasn’t sure what it was, the event text intrigued me to go there. Fredrik and Björn wanted to go aswell. Not really knowing what we would see or experience we went there with a curious mind.
It was an art piece in the forest, where the creators had designed different rooms, everything from talk about grieving to tree climbing. It ended with us all gathering around a fire, and together we created a soup of the most basic ingredients but with a piece from everyone who was there. There was so much happening, and so much to write but I’ll just let the images do the talking.
It is called Arise Amazons – The Green Theory and the creative minds behind the event are the two women Rebecca Tiger and Karin Victorin.” (Isabelle Edlund, a woman I don’t know)
The art project received cultural funding from Stockholm Stad, Nacka Kommun, Kulturrådet och Konstnärsnämnden.
The OracleCyborg GoddessPepper PotemkinThe Green Goddess The PriestexThe Horse Caller Ahkbar The Fire Keeper Preparing the Ceremonial SoupThe Heart Beat – Toni SaunaThe UnicornThe Horse Receives the Soup The Choir Acting For ClimateActing For Climate Flying Between The TreesGrebnellaw with the Megaphone The Medicine Wheel
2021, so far, has been a freakin Wild Ride where I feel motivated and challenged to dare new adventures in my work and art. In this first blog post on the website of my new company, I am happy to announce that I have just completed and published a second master’s thesis on the topic of social robots and society. In spite of corona, I finally managed to push through – to continue writing – no matter what the obstacle and present a critical reading of the current phenomenon of using AI and chatbots in hiring processes. Many thanks to my supervisor professor Ericka Johnson at Linköping University for the dynamic feedback and support in the process.
The topic of this thesis is AI recruitment chatbots, digital discrimination, and data feminism (D´Ignazio and F.Klein 2020), where I aim to critically analyze issues of bias in these types of human-machine interaction technologies. Coming from a professional background of theatre, performance art, and drama,I am curious to analyze how using AI and social robots as hiring tools entails a new type of “stage” (actor’s space), with a special emphasis on social acting. Humans are now required to adjust their performance and facial expressions in the search for, and approval of, a new job. I will use my “theatrical glasses” with an intersectional lens, and through a methodology of cultural analysis, reflect on various examples of conversational AI used in recruitment processes. The silver bullet syndrome is a term that points to a tendency to believe in a miraculous new technological tool that will “magically” solve human-related problems in a company or an organization. The captivating marketing message of the Swedish recruitment conversational AI tool – Tengai Unbiased – is the promise of a scientifically proven objective hiring tool, to solve the diversity problem for company management. But is it really free from bias? According to Karen Barad, agency is not an attribute, but the ongoing reconfiguration of the world influenced by what she terms intra-actions, a mutual constitution of entanglement between human and non-human agencies (2003:818). However, tech developers often disregard their entanglement of human-to-machine interferences which unfortunately generates unconscious bias. The thesis raises ethical questions of how algorithmic measurement of social competence risks holding unconscious biases, benefiting those already privileged or those acting within a normative spectrum.
