This is a recurring event: View all events in the series “Music Research Seminars”
Notes from the Arabic Music industry
Abstract
This talk explores the limitations of decolonising AI in the music industry. Rather than understanding AI as an isolated and coherent object that can be decolonised, it questions whether AI, as a socio-technical assemblage always embedded in its larger cultural and historical contexts, might be better approached through the notion of the colonised coloniser.
Developed by historian Eve Troutt Powell, the concept of the colonised coloniser expresses a position of duality in which one both liberates and dominates simultaneously, where the very drive toward liberation is justified through a logic of domination.
Using the Arabic music industry based out of the UAE and Anghami, a Beirut-based music streaming service, as a case studies, the talk demonstrates how the Arabic music industry operationalises AI in ways that both challenge and uphold relations of power within the region and beyond.
Most broadly, it questions the possibility of decolonising AI, showing its limitations even when starting from the epistemologies of listeners and musicians in the global South.
About the speaker
Darci Sprengel is a Lecturer in the Music Industry in the department of Culture, Media and the Creative Industries at King's College London.
Her current research analyses the imperial politics of music streaming technologies in the MENA/SWANA region using ethnography and feminist and critical race approaches to digital media.
She was previously an Assistant Professor of Popular Music at the University of Groningen (Netherlands) and a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford.
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