Corinna Canali

PhD supervisor: Ramon Amaro
Working title for PhD: 'Automating Inquisition: Censorship of Gender and Sexual Expression in Online Content Moderation'

With a particularised focus on the banishing and removal of non-conforming gender and sexual expression, I am investigating how online content moderation of user-generated content functions as a "politics of truth" reframing the power relations in society and inducing new forms of knowledge and production. My research project, through both practical testing and archival work, engages in a comprehensive analysis of the multiple ways in which artistic and non-artistic depictions of nudity and sexuality are forcefully recast by online censorship. Furthermore, it aims to understand how this affects the creation and consumption of such visual material by both human and non-human viewers. Consequently, my work not only investigates the effect of violent censoring methods on historically othered and nonnormative bodies, but it further foregrounds how the same suppressed bodies have the potential to become powerful withstanding sites of intimacy and subversion.

Contact
corinna.canali.20@ucl.ac.uk

Qualifications
BA Design and Art, Free University of Bolzano (Bolzano, Italy), 2011-2015. I completed my academic degree with a thesis on the fears characterising the West in the 20th century translated into a fictional set of new amulets, ritual performances and propitiatory spells modelled after the European superstitious tradition.

MA Fine Art and Design MA (distinction), Non Linear Narrative at KABK Royal Academy of Art The Hague (The Hague, Netherlands), 2017-2019. I graduated with a thesis on gender censorship and normative gentrification by social networking companies. My research materialised into an interactive installation investigating the algorithmic censorship of human sexuality by face recognition software. The work was nominated for both the KABK Academy Thesis Award and for the KABK Academy Award.