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The Good Robot podcast: Critiquing tech through comedy with Laura Allcorn
Hosted by Eleanor Drage and Kerry McInerney, The Good Robot is a podcast which explores the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology.
Critiquing tech through comedy with Laura Allcorn
In this episode, we go shopping with artist and performer, Laura Allcorn. We enter into her practice, which is called the Institute for Comedic Inquiry, to learn how she pairs humour and entertainment with participatory public engagement methods to raise awareness about bizarre and dangerous uses of AI. Laura uses comedy to skewer all manner of ethically questionable technologies, from gait surveillance to shopping algorithms. We participate in one of Laura’s performances in this episode, ‘SKU-MARKET’, an algorithmic shopping platform that promises to know you better than you know yourself. Stay tuned for what the algorithm says about us…
Listen to the episode here:
Laura Allcorn is a creative director, experience designer, and humorist. She founded The Institute For Comedic Inquiry (IFCI), a comedian-led research group. At IFCI she creates interactive objects and participatory performances that point out absurdities through a technique she calls ‘Participatory Satire.’ Her work focuses on how humor connects people to each other and new ideas–especially the ones that challenge narrow assumptions. She has studied all forms of comedy including satire writing, improvisation, sketch, and stand-up comedy.
You can find the episode reading list and transcript here.
About The Good Robot Podcast
Dr Eleanor Drage and Dr Kerry McInerney are Research Associates at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, where they work on the Mercator-Stiflung funded project on Desirable Digitalisation. Previously, they were Christina Gaw Postdoctoral Researchers in Gender and Technology at the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies. During the COVID-19 pandemic they decided to co-found The Good Robot Podcast to explore the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology.
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