During the “Take a Walk Through the Platform” workshop, participants worked in groups to analyse apps, social media platforms, or websites, focusing on their sociomaterial dimensions: cultural perspectives, political visions, user personas, and affordances. The walkthrough slows down habitual navigation, making the familiar strange. Participants then created affective cartographies reassembling platforms, giving voice to silenced elements and recognizing the materiality of the digital. Together, these exercises embrace the affirmative dimension inherent in critical platform studies.
The group that walked-through ChatGPT platform tried to express through a interactive performance, using the narrative framework of the minimal interface itself (previously analyzed using STS framework disposed during the previous seminars of the Winter School. They readapted the Little Red Riding Hood story and embodied the sentiments the group members felt in the use of the platform. The story expresses in an ironic way the journey from fear and suspicion through subjugation towards the goal of empowerment of the user, picturing the GPT itself as a possible ally (that can prevent the emancipation), an enemy, and a tool, in any case not neutral, and the continuous tension between the states of user and active agent.
The generated images
Solarpunk Little Red Riding Hood – George P. Towers – Nonna Haraway