Caroline Sinders

Feminist Data Set is a multi-year ongoing art project that combines lectures, workshops, and calls to action to collect feminist data. What is feminist data? Feminist data can be art works, essays, interviews, and books that are from, about or explore feminism and a feminist perspective. The creation of this feminist data set will act as a means to combat bias and introduce the possibility of data collection as a feminist practice, aiming to produce a slice of data to intervene in larger civic and private networks. Increasingly moving towards design, the series explores how data and interfaces can be agents of change within machine learning systems that are utilized by the public and private sectors of our daily lives. This project uses insights from machine learning analytics, design thinking iterations and interventions to investigate varying methods of creating a feminist data set. Feminist Data Set proposes an intersectional feminist antidote to the default usage of patriarchal language. The work asks: can data collection itself function as an artwork? Can it act as a form of protest?

This project is largely based on the idea that to remove bias within machine learning, the ‘removal of bias’ itself has to be manifested into a ‘thing’ to teach or sway the algorithms. By using workshops, I start to define the parameters for feminist words, interactions, their definitions, their origins and, potentially, their creators. The project aims to initiate a standard for equity and equality, by centering collaboration in the creation of this data set. Ultimately existing as a source that can be applied to data and technology, it will also take shape as a living document and practical poetry, updating the current understanding of cyberfeminism.

This work has been shown at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SOHO20 Gallery, SPACE Art and Technology Center, De-leb Banner Repeater, and Resonate Festival.

The project was shortlisted for a prize here. An interview about the current iteration of Feminist Data Set is here.