Unfolding Algorithmic Agency is a workshop I coordinated with Sandro Poli and Simón Schwarz of the media art collective Labor 5020 at the Otherwise experimental festival, H0.Institute and IXDM, 1–3 March 2019.
Participants ideated and shared their own notions of what algorithms are and what role they play in daily life. In small groups they worked through one of five tracks and mapped their thoughts into an ethical framework for the politics of algorithms: where are the limits of what is OK for you, for me and for all of us?
Tracks
- Human agency in shaping reality: how can we still affect, or not affect, the way the algorithmic future unfolds?
- Algorithms as friends: how can the algorithm become an ally for shaping reality and handling complexity?
- Disrupting algorithmic power structures: what can we do about freedom and the power accumulated by the current algorithmic monopolies?
- Urban algorithmic infrastructures: how can we frame ethics in everyday contexts such as dating, navigation, transportation, automation and shopping?
- Algorithmic culture: what is the role of algorithms in cultural production and reproduction, in knowledge, truth, creation, aesthetics and narratives?
Format
Participants were encouraged to think of themselves not only as humans but as other algorithms, objects, animals, plants, machines, living and unanimated beings. After an open roundtable, the groups ideated strategies to stage the emergence of unforeseen behaviour by embodying algorithms, or embedding them in re-enactments of social practices, and to be as disruptive as possible while doing it. A simple-rule exercise with autonomous agents opened the embodied part. The groups then staged their conversations as performances in a space captured by a ceiling camera and projected back into the room in real time.
Documentation
The workshop is documented in a chapter of a longer paper, Algorithms. The Dark Constitution of the ‘New’ World, in Arts in Context, HKB, 2020.
Download the chapter (PDF, 200 KB) · DOI
Team
Andrés Villa Torres, Sandro Poli, Simón Schwarz.
Partners
Otherwise Experimental Festival, curated by Michaela Büsse and Benjamin Bürger. H0.Institute, IXDM, Labor 5020.
