Algorithmic Violence in Palestine

AI surveillance technologies give rise to echo chambers, political polarization and extremist and authoritarian regimes throughout the world. These regimes can use AI-powered technologies such as facial recognition, databases or drones to target and attack more easily and more inhumanly groups of people.

Gaza has been the setting for such recent devastating uses of AI technologies, such as ‘Lavender’, a database used by the Israeli army to kill some 37,000 Hamas targets. Lavender has been reported to have an error rate of 10% with little regard to the error rate of this technology.

An extensive facial recognition program based in part on Google Photos has also been deployed in the area, as well as Google’s Project Nimbus that has brought up public outcry for the unlawful collection of personal data of Palestinians.

The activist website stopkiller.ai offers insights into these opaque proceedings. Artists have also been vocal around the Palestinian cause. In PalCoreCore (2023),the Palestinian multidisciplinary artist and researcher Dana Dawud steps out of the imagery of Palestinians as martyrs to create “an ode to the resilience of the human spirit against the forces of obliteration”. Through it, Dawud wants to underscore a different way of resistance while not sapping the ongoing genocide.

Watch PalCoreCore by Dana Dawud

Algorithmic Violence in Palestine was the subject of an exhibition concept that I created in collaboration with Suzanne Cleerdin, Noah Heylen, and Antoine Simeão Schalk.

Screenshot of PalCoreCore (2023) by Dana Dawud

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