Daniel Binns is a media theorist and filmmaker tinkering with the weird edges of technology, storytelling, and screen culture. He is the author of Material Media-Making in the Digital Age and currently writes about posthuman poetics, glitchy machines, and speculative media worlds.
A little while ago, I spoke with machine learning engineer and responsible AI expert Bogdana Rakova about my approach to generative AI education and research: embracing the weird, messy, and broken aspects of these technologies rather than trying to optimise them.
This conversation was part of Bogdana’s expert interview series on ‘Speculative F(r)iction in AI Use and Governance,’ examining form, function, fiction, and friction in AI systems.
We discussed my classroom experiments mixing origami with code, the ‘Fellowship of Tiny Minds’ AI pedagogy project, and why I deliberately push AI systems to their breaking points. The conversation explores how glitches and so-called ‘hallucinations’ can reveal deeper truths about how these systems work, and why we need more playful, hands-on approaches to AI literacy.
The piece connects to my ongoing research into everyday AI: examining glitch as a tactic of resistance, the time-looped recursive futures of the Slopocene, and experimental methods for rethinking creativity, labour, and literacy in an era of machine assistants.
Read the full chat at this link, and share your creative responses on the page if you’re moved to!
Since the interminable Melbourne lockdowns and their horrific effect on the population of the city, my place of work has implemented ‘slow-down’ periods. These are usually timed around the usual holiday periods, e.g. Christmas, Easter, but there’s usually also a slowdown scheduled around mid-semester and mid-year breaks. The idea isn’t exactly to stop work (in this economy? ahahahaha no, peasant.) but rather to skip or postpone any non-essential meetings and spend time on focused work. Most often for teacher-researchers like myself, this constitutes catching up on marking assignments or prepping for the coming weeks of classes, though sometimes we can scrape up some time to think about long-gestating research projects or creative work. That’s the theory, anyway.
I will say it’s nice to pause meetings for a week or two. The nature of academic work is (and should be) collaborative, dependent on bouncing ideas off others, working together to solve gnarly pedagogical issues, pooling resources to compile rich and nuanced ciritical work. But if you’re balancing teaching or coordination along with administrative or managerial duties, plus postgraduate supervisions and research stuff, it can be a lot of being on, a lot of just… people work. I’ll throw in a quick disclaimer here that I’m very lucky to have a bunch of lovely colleagues, and the vast majority of my students have been almost saccharinely delightful to work with. It can still be a lot, though, if you’re pretty woeful at scheduling around your energy levels, as I often am. Hashtag high achiever, hashtag people pleaser, hashtag burnout, hashtag hashtag etc etc etc.
Academics are notorious for keeping weird hours, or for working too much, or for not having any boundaries around work and life. And I say this as someone who has embodied that stereotype with aplomb for years (even pre-academia, to be honest). I’ve had many conversations with colleagues where we bemoan working late into the evening, or over the weekend, or around other commitments. I’ve often been hard-pressed to find anyone who has any hard boundaries around work and not-work.
Taking extended leave last year was the first time I’ve ever properly stopped working. No sneaky finishing of research projects, no brainstorming the next media class, no cheeky research reading, no emails. It showed me many things, but primarily how insidious work can be for someone with my disposition and approach to life in general. It is also insidious when you are passionate, and when you care. I care deeply about media education and research, and have become familiar with its rhythms and contours, its stresses and its delights, its (many) foibles and much deeper issues. I care about students and ensuring they feel not just ‘delivered to’ or ‘spoken at’, but rather that they’re exposed to new ways of thinking; inspired to learn well beyond graduation, indeed, to never stop learning; enabled and empowered to tell their stories, and whatever stories they want to tell. I care about producing research, e.g. journal articles, video essays, presentations and events, that is not tired, stale, staid, boring, dense, conventional, but rather is experimental, vibrant, connected, open-ended, and appeals broadly across multiple disciplines and outside the academy.
I’m not alone here. As mentioned above, I have colleagues who almost universally feel exactly the same way. And I’ve built a local and international research network who share these passions and questions and concerns. A global support group. I’m very lucky and privileged in this way.
But yeah: all this shit is fucking exhausting. The environment, the sector, the period, certainly doesn’t help. The current model of academia, university management, tertiary education, the industry/academy nexus, capitalism (in summary: neoliberalism), all of it is quite happy to capitalise on passion, on modern productivity dicta around never-being-done, irons-in-the-fire, publish or perish, manage it all or die, no life for you, hang the consequences and anyone you’re dealing with who isn’t work (e.g. partners, kids, friends, families). To anyone who says academics have a cushy job and get paid too much: kindly take yourself into the sea, thanks. That may have been true in the past, but we’re living on the other side of whatever spectrum you’re looking at.
Suffice to say, slowdowns are nice. Taking proper breaks and/or having an executive echelon that genuinely supports and structures wellbeing and balance would be ideal, but beggars can’t be choosers.
I am lucky to have a job that I love. But in the eighteen months of settling into full-time academia, I seem to have lost sight of the ‘love’ and become fixated on the ‘job’. A weird thing has happened in recent weeks, in that I’ve tried to become more focused on what is actually important about my work — and what feels the most rewarding.
There are two main strands to the workload of an academic at my level: teaching and research. Research covers the writing and publication of scholarly work — be it journal articles, book chapters, conference presentations, monographs. Teaching is what it says on the tin.
In 2011, mid-PhD, I took my first class at Western Sydney University (then UWS). It was a boring compulsory course, but I caught the bug, and have loved teaching ever since. With the transition to full-time employment, I’ve always tried to have time for my students, time to sink into my pedagogy, but that time has always felt sapped by other commitments. I say felt, because I’ve realised that the sapping of time has only occurred because I’ve let it.
This semester, I’ve turned a corner. The most important commitments I have, during semester time, are my students. Everything else is secondary. To be clear, I don’t think the time I spend on teaching or research will change this semester (I have a book chapter to finish, a presentation to write, and a monograph to approve all by September). Rather what has changed is where my head is at most of the time: ensuring my students are, if not blissfully happy, then at least reasonably clear about what I’m trying to teach them, and the experience I would — ideally — like them to have.
First point: I am a teacher. This is a role that bestows on me power and control over others.
Second point: I am white, male, heterosexual, educated, and middle-class. This is an identity that inscribes within me a particular world-view.
Third point: I teach film and media studies. This is a discipline which is inherently linked to the neoliberalist agendas of globalisation, consumer culture, and corporate-political power.
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Neoliberalism fosters a complicit and compliant consumer citizenry, and much of this is based on the marginalising of non-dominant voices in the public sphere, and the exploitation of the owners of those voices to perpetuate power structures and the ‘global’ marketplace (Gorski 2008, p. 518). The goal of most protocols or policies concerning multicultural or intercultural education seems to be the furthering of these neoliberalist agenda, at least according to Gorski (p. 519). The other alarming characteristic of most attempts at cultural inclusiveness within education is a lack of awareness of the wider sociopolitical context; in essence, an ignorance of the wider world.
As educators, both Gorski and Holladay (2013) have worked through a neoliberalist understanding of what multicultural education should be. For Gorski, this involves ‘the facilitation of intercultural dialogue, an appreciation for diversity, and cultural exchange’ (p. 520). For Holladay, it means working with elementary school children through a limited perspective on historical events. Both of these educators, too, have been complicit in allowing the trivialisation of important events to occur on their watch — case in point: Taco Night.
To reject neoliberalist agenda in intercultural education, Gorski suggests that it is not learning activities or lesson plans that need to change. Rather, an entire intellectual and philosophical shift must occur within the educator. Part of this is acknowledging that ‘cultural awareness is not enough’ and that ignorance of the sociopolitical context further marginalises those already non-dominant voices in the learning space. Holladay takes it further: by infusing multiple perspectives into learning, what the educator is doing is converting ‘consumers’ (the neoliberalist student-subject) into socially-aware critical thinkers. The biggest problem facing both novel paradigms of education, from my reading, is that critical thinking is not seen by the neoliberalist conspiracy as a marketable skill.
As a media teacher, I am aware that the industry into which I am sending my students is competitive and is also linked to very old structures of power. However, I see that I have a responsibility to ensure that all my students can survive in this world. Part of this is ensuring that they are aware of those structures of power, and a further part is demonstrating ways in which those monolithic frameworks have been defied, or even ignored. The wonderful thing about film and media studies currently, is that many who were long silent now have access to production and distribution technologies. I have a responsibility to ensure all of my students can harness those technologies themselves.
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First point: I am a teacher. I have a responsibility to ensure that all my students feel valued, and to offer and encourage them all to share their voices.
Second point: I am white, male, heterosexual, educated, and middle-class. This does not absolve me from the responsibility identified in the first point; it should, in fact, inspire me to work harder to ensure equality in the learning environment.
Third point: I teach film and media studies. This is a discipline which has the power to break down perceived social barriers, to allow non-dominant voices to express their views, and to widen a student’s perspective on the world they share.
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References
Gorski, PC 2008, ‘Good intentions are not enough: a decolonizing intercultural education’, Intercultural Education, vol. 19, no. 6, pp. 515-525.
