Technological Inhumanities and Imaginaries

Asians and Asian-ness have long circulated in literature, cinema, and pop culture as figures of science fiction threat and fantasy—what Michelle N. Huang has identified as the “inhuman figures” of robots, clones, and aliens. Beyond these techno-orientalist stereotypes and tropes, however, lies the shadow of social and economic forces that have materialized the injustice of such racialized logics, as well as artistic investigations that play with critical transformations of its coded imaginary.  

This panel will put into conversation three scholars—Huan He, Jennifer Pranolo, and Whit Pow—whose research and teaching on the history, practice, and aesthetics of computational media extends the critique of representation that would spectacularly equate Asians/Asian-ness with a technological inhumanity. In distinct but reciprocal ways, their work complicates the blank interfaces of technology while asking how those technologies have been used to mediate modes and strategies of escape—through alternate narratives, archives, and forms—from seemingly inescapable regimes of representation.