Welcome to Calculate {Freedom}

A film-based workshop on culture, data, and meaning

Calculate {Freedom} is a hybrid experience—part short film, part guided workshop—that explores how cultural knowledge shapes the way data is collected, classified, and interpreted in contemporary AI systems.

Designed by Undisciplined, the project invites participants to engage with machine learning concepts through Gullah Geechee cultural frameworks, drawing attention to what data systems often miss, flatten, or erase when context is removed.

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How the Experience Works

This workshop unfolds in two connected modules. Together, they move from cultural foundations to applied interpretation, using story, artifacts, and AI tools as points of inquiry rather than fixed answers.

Module 1: Cultural Context and Data Reclassification

The first module focuses on how meaning enters a system before data is ever processed.

Participants are introduced to a Kongo creation story and a working vocabulary drawn from Kongo cosmology. These frameworks are used to examine a curated set of Gullah Geechee cultural artifacts based on historical research that traces specific practices, symbols, and material forms in Gullah culture to Central African—particularly Kongo—cosmological traditions.

The workshop works through this connection not as a claim of singular origin, but as one of the many cultural lineages that shaped this coastal community. Through guided classification exercises, participants re-label and reorganize historical objects using cosmological relationships rather than conventional archival categories, revealing how inherited worldviews quietly influence systems of classification—from museums and archives to contemporary machine learning models.

Module 2: Missing Data and Cultural Practices in AI

The second module centers on the short film Calculate {Freedom}.

The film introduces the idea of missing, obscured, or “dark” data—knowledge that exists outside dominant data structures but continues to shape cultural memory and lived experience.

Participants then interact with a prototype algorithm using selected stills from the film. Rather than generating answers, the model is used as a reflective tool to explore symbolism, cosmological references, and layered meaning embedded in the visuals. This process demonstrates how culturally grounded interpretive frameworks can reshape how AI systems read, respond, and learn.

Who This Is For

This workshop is designed for artists, technologists, educators, researchers, and curious learners interested in how culture, memory, and meaning shape data systems and AI technologies.

Participants do not need technical training in machine learning. The experience is structured as a guided inquiry—combining film, cultural analysis, and hands-on interpretation—to explore how assumptions enter data systems and how alternative frameworks can expand what those systems are able to perceive.

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