Alternative Intelligences
When: Friday, June 21, 2024, 9:30 AM - 9:30 PM
Where: BLOC, Arts One, Queen Mary, Mile End Road, Mile End Campus
Speaker: Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa, Debris Stevenson, Hannah Silva, Kayo Chingonyi
From the artificial to the neuroqueer - a creative symposium devoted to play, creativity & alternative intelligences
Alternative Intelligences: Playing with AI - 9:30-6pm
Inspired by Jeanette Winterson's call to perceive AI as "alternative," not "artificial" intelligence, join us for Alternative Intelligences: From AI to neuroqueer expression, we consider alternative ways of thinking and creating. Our keynote speakers are Dr Kate Devlin (King’s College) "Do you need any body? The friendly machine" and Professor Yasmin Ibrahim (QMUL) "Re-reading AI Visuality: Play, Violence and the Unreal". Julia Bell (Birkbeck College) will present from her book, Radical Attention. Composer, Professor Atau Tanaka (Goldsmiths University), discusses “Human Learning x Machine Learning’. Laurane Marchive presents her work on AI and circus and Dr Hannah Silva shares the neuroqueer working process behind their memoir My Child, the Algorithm.
Alternative Intelligences: Neuroqueering Poetry - doors 6:45pm
A dynamic evening of poetry performances by neurodiverse poets, hosted by Koko Brown.
BSL interpreted.
Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa is a choreopoet and researcher whose exhilarating style of poetics braids dance and poetry on the page and stage. Her debut poetry collection Cane, Corn & Gully explored the narratives of enslaved Barbadian women and their descendants through their dances, it won the 2023 Forward Prize for Best First Collection.
Debris Stevenson is a dyslexic writer, Grime poet, hybrid actor and pro-raver. Her work explores the intersectional, unexpected, and unjust – often whilst making her audiences dance, question, and laugh. Debris’ debut show, Poet in da Corner, premiered at The Royal Court in 2018, receiving 4-5 stars and seeing Debris nominated for an Emerging Talent of The Year Award (Evening Standard Theatre Awards).
Hannah Silva is a writer and performer working in sound poetry, radio and experimental non-fiction. An Artificially Intelligent Guide to Love (BBC Radio 4) starred Fiona Shaw and was the starting point for My Child, the Algorithm (a 2023 Granta book of the year).
Kayo Chingonyi is poetry editor at Bloomsbury and assistant professor in creative writing at Durham University. His latest collection, A Blood Condition was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the T.S. Eliot Prize, and the Costa Poetry Award.
The performances are followed by a panel discussion with Professor Matthew Rubery, questioning the ways in which alternative intelligences, from neurodiversity to AI, impact creativity and writing.
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Alternative Intelligences is organised by Dr Cristina Moreno Almeida and Dr Hannah Silva of Queen Mary University of London. Supported by the IHSS Digital Lives programme, the Centre for Contemporary Writing, Research Culture at Queen Mary, and the Leverhulme Trust. This event is part of Finding the Right Words - a creative research project led by Debris Stevenson and Hannah Silva supported by The Arts Council England and Apples and Snakes.