From the Women of Algiers (1834) painting, postcards of the odalisque, to the photograph of the Afghan Girl (1984), representations of Muslim women have been pervasively captured in various image forms across time. Plotted across the 19^th to 21^st centuries, different technologies have contributed to the exponential reproduction and circulation of Muslim women images, evoking a visuality that highlights intersections of technology, ideology, and geography. In the data turn, a new algorithmic visuality is introduced, yielding new formulations to old paradigms.

I theorise algorithmic visuality through an analysis of the circulation and correlation of Muslim women images on global search engines, highlighting the discriminatory characteristics of automation. This is challenged through augmentation, explored in activations by digital feminist artists and the articulation of a digital Nusantara. Annotation is subsequently introduced as a pedagogical tool of bringing back the bodies to big data through a participatory action research workshop with self-identified Muslim women in Singapore. 

Through annotation, augmentation, and annotation, I introduce research designs as resources and strategies of studying the image-as-data, AI art, and data representation. These contribute toward curriculums that seek to destabilise imperial technologies and challenge colonial subjectivities.

Speaker

Nurul Huda Rashid is a postdoctoral researcher with Project 0100 at Leiden University. Her research maps the visuality of Muslim women images from the daguerreotype camera into the data shift, and lies in the intersections of critical gender and race studies, data and AI studies, and photo and archive theory.

Moderator

David Kloos is a historian and anthropologist with a focus on Southeast Asia. His main interests are religion (particularly Islam), gender, the politics of knowledge formation, visual methods, and the study of the social, political, and cultural aspects of climate change.

Format, date, time & venue

This seminar is a hybrid event and will be held in the conference room of KITLV, Herta Mohr building, room 1.30, Witte Singel 27 A, Leiden and online via Zoom, on Thursday 19 June from 14.00 – 15.30 PM (CET).

Registration

If you want to join this seminar on location, please register via: kitlv@kitlv.nl

If you wish to join this seminar online, please register here

Image

Annotations from PAR workshop with Muslim women, Singapore (2022). Photo by Nurul Huda Rashid.