Year: 2019
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Performing Algorithms: Automation and Accident investigates how artists might stage encounters with the algorithms driving our post-industrial, big-data-based, automatic society.Several important theories of this contemporary condition are discussed, including control societies, post-industrial societies, the automatic society, the cybernetic hypothesis, and algorithmic governmentality.These concepts are interwoven with histories of labour and automation, recent developments in machine learning and neural networks, and my own past work.Through a series of expanded lecture performances that describe our algorithmic condition while setting it into motion, this research seeks to discover ways in which to advance new critical positions within a totalizing technical apparatus whose very design preempts it.The included creative works have been performed, exhibited, and published between 2014 and 2018.They are made available online through an artificially intelligent chatbot, a frequent figure in the research, which here extends the concerns of that research through to how the work is framed and presented.In higher education, one finds themselves at the nexus of the various meanings of the word credit.The degree is a credit, a token that one has fulfilled assorted requirements, ticked boxes, and cleared whatever hurdles of demonstrable or new contributions to knowledge.And over the past few decades, these credits have become increasingly expensive, requiring that students borrow against their future in order to acquire them.An inverted credit, lives indebted.These are profoundly individualizing processes, which are reflected in the proliferation of IDs, passwords, and course management software.While this pedigree, this symbolic capital can only be given by the institution, it is possible for me to give credit to others, however, and I have dutifully done so throughout the footnotes and bibliography.This is one way that I might make apparent that I am located within discursive networks and histories and that my own intellectual and artistic development has been shaped by them.And yet.And yet, the many self-reflective comments and references still fall far short of really, actually telling that story and acknowledging the significant and varied modes of material support that have been as formative, but otherwise invisible.
Author: Sean Patrick Dockray
Language: English
Topic: Art, Technology, and Culture
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2990736456