Future Genders Archive – Undoing Binaries

Future Genders Archive: A Workshop + Zine-Making Series

Most machine learning models record gender as a fixed, binary data point. In everyday life, gender is something people express and live out, and it changes with context, community and time.

The Future Genders Archive is a monthly workshop series that translates feminist theory and Science and Technology Studies (STS) into accessible design methods for imagining fluid, expansive technical futures. Each month, a guest facilitator gives a short talk on one theme.

In this workshop, we'll use the wisdom of dreaming to challenge various binaries. Are sleeping and waking states really so opposite? What divides the rational from the irrational, and who decides this? How many selves, with how many genders, exist within us? Where is the line between my dream and yours, and can we cross it? Participants will be invited to share scenes they remember from their own dreams, and together we'll complicate binaries through creative experiments.

Participants then respond through collage, drawing and writing with help from a design mentor. Each session's pages become a zine, and the zines build into a public archive of gender-diverse AI futures.

The Future Genders Archive is associated with Concordia University through the Applied AI Institute. The workshop explores gender diversity and AI, encouraging people to think critically about how gender is represented in technology and how we can create a more inclusive future.