WORKSHOP

This interactive workshop provided an opportunity to contend with the ethical, technological, legal, and racial justice questions that continue to arise, in light of the COVID pandemic and after the recent police killings in the US. Led by CLIC Artist-in-Residence, Sarah Newman, with special guest Mutale Nkonde, this workshop reflects on some of the most pressing questions we face both individually and as a society. The workshop is focused on using creative, collaborative art as a way to grapple with such questions.

The Value Alignment Problem, recently popularized by AI, is the challenge of assuring that the goals either embedded in systems or secondary goals that they subsequently form are aligned with the values of the society they serve. Such questions of value alignment map onto the further questions with which we now must contend: questions about public safety and personal liberty, privacy and surveillance, systemic biases, and public health during a pandemic.

Through a series of activities and discussions, participants will contribute questions that will later be assembled  into a “Moral Labyrinth”, providing an opportunity for further reflection and meditation on timely (and timeless) questions.

The Moral Labyrinth workshop was one of the most fun, surprising, and engaging experiences of my quarantine. It was also not at all what I expected. Often, workshops center around an expert who delivers information to participants. It's a passive process, this information transfer, and fosters some idea that there are experts with answers, and if we would only ask, we would understand.

In the Moral Labyrinth workshop though, we as participants submitted questions that we didn't know answers to, some of which were fundamentally unanswerable. Because of this, even though the workshop was led by the artists and researchers Sarah Newman and Mutale Nkonde, there were no experts, and we were all on equal ground as participants.

The question of reliability, accountability, and who we should trust was particularly relevant this summer, when in the midst of conflicting health advice and racially motivated police violence, we realized how our experts and institutions were, at the very least, biased and flawed. Absent guidance and authority, many of us felt alone in trying to make the right choices.

During the workshop though, as each of us read our questions out loud and discussed them with one another, we found mutual recognition. As I interacted with strangers from all over the country and world, I had the sense that not only were our questions equally real and valid, but also shared and reflected.

As each of us grapples and comes to terms with the unanswerable and the unknown, the Moral Labyrinth workshop provides a uniquely valuable experience to openly and honestly discuss, recognize, and acknowledge our collective doubts and fears.

- Lynette Lee, workshop participant