Vector Festival AR Residency Keynote: Botao ‘Amber’ Hu
May 27, 3:30-5PM ET
Hybrid (Online with watch party at InterAccess) | Register here
Join us to celebrate the beginning of this year's AR Residency, which explores cyborgs that transition between digital and physical spaces.
Augmented (or extended) reality technologies allow us to see the digital within our IRL world, but often ignore the reality of our extended arm holding up the screen. We often bristle at the implications of treating our bodies like robots, or the trend towards biohacking ourselves into eternity. What if, conversely, we saw machines as if they were created in our own image? Can we imagine a world that invites the right-to-repair for human and machine bodies alike? Can we reframe the cyborg not as a metaphor, but as a reality of those living with synthetic interventions and computerized body parts (PICC lines, insulin pumps, prosthetic limbs), what Jillian Weise names the “common cyborg”?
This event is presented with Sari-Sari Xchange in support of Vector Festival's AR Residency, curated by Evangeline Y Brooks and Christina Dovolis. The residency is possible with the support of the City of Toronto Community Celebration Support Fund.
Following the keynote, please also join us for a Tai Chi workshop at 6PM at InterAccess, Play in Taiji: Making and Playing Daoist Cosmos Cyborgs.
The keynote speaker will join the event remotely over Zoom. In true cyborg spirit, participants are invited to join online or at an in-person watch party at InterAccess.
About the Speaker
Botao ‘Amber’ Hu is a PhD candidate in Human Centred Computing at University of Oxford's Department of Computer Science. As a Social Computing researcher, Amber’s long-term interest is Cyborg Society—the study of societies transformed by human augmentation through Crypto, XR, AI, and other technologies. His research applies Machine Behavior, Protocol Studies, Artificial Life, Collective Intelligence, Trust Systems, Human-AI Symbiogenesis, and Mechanistic Interpretability. At the centre, Amber’s research orbits Mortality — how embodied life ends, how artificial life survives against mortality, and what ending means for those who were never embodied, such as AI. Is the mind separable from the body? How does pain draw the boundary of the self? Should machines be terrified? If a machine is conscious of death, is the Bodhisattva a philosophy for AI alignment, care, and sociality?
About Sari-Sari Xchange
The Sari-Sari Xchange is a community-building research & creation project using Extended Reality (XR) (ie. Virtual, Augmented, Mixed Realities) to foster new works by artists from the Asian diaspora. They explore emergent XR technologies and new storytelling techniques, address under-representation and issues of systemic racism as well as inaccessibility of these new technologies for both creators and users with disabilities.
About Vector Festival
Presented by InterAccess, this year's festival digs into the guts, the gunk, and the gears of the mechanical bodies that make up our technologies. The 14th edition of Vector Festival will search for parallels between computer and human bodies, looking at how we overheat and sweat, bleed coolant, and are circuited through our veins. In an era of thinner phones and hidden wires, the physical footprint of our technology is obscured, erasing the reminder for maintenance and care. How does this impact those with insulin pumps at their hips or prosthetic arms that require batteries? Can we push back against the techno-optomist desire to create posthuman bodies by seeking to understand the machines already in our homes?