The Body in Algorithms

Algorithms design objective ‘knowns’ in order to anticipate behaviours and reduce future uncertainties. They produce measurable and calculable data, causing an organization of entropy, the emulation of bias, and practice of racial exclusions. Algorithmic-inscribed power relations flood the human body through consumable media, fabricating a network of conflicting potentialities. The body, defined in and through these systems of quantifiable data, is in a parameter of logic where sense experience ruminates with technological ‘truths.’ 

Through technological systems, we have expanded beyond our physicality and intimately provoked surveillance technologies to see, and inform, our most inner self. The panopticon, a western embodiment of sight with its single territory perspective - where one body is looking at multiple moving bodies in a cell - has shifted into a new realm. The ‘all seeing eye’ has entered into the network of our cell-bodies altering the mechanisms from which we understand our body. In its capacity to refract bodily sensations and expressions into data, surveillance technologies freeze the liquid body into a state of definitive knowing.

Participants include Sebastian Althoff, Anatola Araba, Ofri Cnaani, Jordan Cunliffe, Clareese Hill, Sarah Martinus, and Amanda Rice. Themes of the project include Algorithmic Governmentality; Quantum Computation; Coding Choreography; Materiality and Extractivism; and the Body as Data. 

ANATOLA ARABA

Anatola is a storyteller artist, filmmaker, and futurist from New York City. Her creations have been showcased in film festivals, museums, and art galleries across the globe. She’s had various artworks displayed at the MoMA, Museum of Modern Art in NYC. Her filmmaking has been recognized by AT&T’s Film Awards for New Forms of Storytelling, Social Impact Media Awards, the Unity for Humanity Summit, and more. She works at Hearst Magazines, where she works across the video and content teams of Harper’s Bazaar, Oprah Daily, Elle Magazines, and many more magazines. She graduated in 2021 from NYU Tisch School of the Arts where she majored in Film and Television Production with a double minor in Social Entrepreneurship and Interactive Media Arts. With the mantra that “creativity is the greatest tool of humanity,” Anatola’s passion is to use emerging technologies to diversify the pool of circulating personal and cultural narratives. Her goal is to innovate, inspire, and reimagine the world as it could be.

description of work

Afro Algorithms is a 3D animated short film in the Afrofuturist genre explores the topics of AI and bias. In a distant future, an artificial intelligence named Aero is inaugurated as the world’s first AI ruler. But Aero soon learns that important worldviews are missing from her databank, including the experiences of the historically marginalized and oppressed. A slate of well-known Black artists lend their voices to the film, including Robin Quivers, Hoji Fortuna, and Ava Raiin.

Ofri Cnaani

Ofri Cnaani is an artist, currently living in London. She works in time-based media, performances, and installations. Cnaani is a Ph.D. researcher and an Associate Lecturer at Advance Practice program in the Visual Cultures Department, Goldsmiths, University of London. Cnaani’s work appeared at Tate Britain, UK; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC; Inhotim Institute, Brazil; Israel Museum; Amos Rex Museum, Helsink; Kiasma Museum, Helsinki; PS1/MoMA, NYC; BMW Guggenheim Lab, NYC; The Fisher Museum of Art, L.A.; Twister, Network of Lombardy Contemporary Art Museums, Italy; Herzliya Museum of Art, Israel; Moscow Biennial; The Kitchen, NYC; Bronx Museum of the Arts, NYC; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Arnolfini Foundation Museum, Bristol; Tel Aviv Museum; Prague Triennial. Prior to her recent move to London, Cnaani was based in New York City, where she was a faculty at the School of Visual Arts’s Visual and Critical Studies. At SVA she also ran the 'City as Site: Public Performance + Social interventions' program.

description of work

The increasing complexity of the body as a data-subject constantly asks for reconsideration of the critical terminologies that pays attention to the impulse of capital as it intimately circulates the body. How can we get in touch with the shifting conditions created by large-scale computation through what our bodies know, and can we situate new modes of data governance as a problem of and in the body? I use two recent technologies and a series of performative encounters to observe the promise of frictionless movement as shaped by the capitalist sensorium. First, I look at Contactless technologies that have emerged from the financial terrain and proliferated the urban environments. Contactless seeks contact, yet not of the fleshy kind; it always retains a critical distance between body and object. Then, I annotate the phenomenon of ‘Auto Sync’, a common feature in a family of ‘quantified-self’ technologies. Here the fantasy of smooth movement doesn’t stop in the urban milieu but vibrates in our bodies and creeps under the skin.

Jordan Cunliffe

An artist who focuses on data visualisation through the medium of hand embroidery. Her background is in textiles and her MA practice focussed on using the process of hand embroidery as a tool to make sense of ones feelings, surroundings and life experiences. Jordan looks at the combination of the contemporary practice of data visualisation, and how it works alongside the traditional craft of hand embroidery. The outcomes of her textile pieces are the result of her trying to understand a complicated range of emotions, and the repetitive and time consuming act of the stitching serves as a technique to process the emotions as well.

description of work

This bespoke piece of hand embroidery is based on a single day in my life. Using wearable technology I have tracked sleep patterns, movement and heart rate, as well as monitoring and recording emotions. The outcome is a textile data visualisation to encompass ‘the body’ during a 24 hour period. This is one-of-a-kind as the likelihood of gathering the same data again is almost statistically impossible.

amanda rice

Amanda Rice is an artist based in London (b. 1985, Mayo, Ireland) working in moving image and installation. She has exhibited at Eva International Biennial, Ireland, the Wrong Biennale at Arebyte Gallery, London, The University College London (UCL) Art Museum, Flux Factory, New York, Eastlink Gallery, Shanghai, Charlton Gallery, London, VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art, Ireland and is currently has a solo show entitled ‘No One Can Ever Embargo the Sun’ at M8 Space, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland. She completed an MA at Slade School of Fine Art in 2018 and was awarded the Edward Allington Memorial Prize and shortlisted for the lmacantar Studio Award. She was awarded the Arts Council of Ireland Next Generation Award for 2019/2020

description of work

Solar energy is a mode of ‘clean’ energy production, which like contemporary media hardware (such as cloud computing, data centres) is sold to us as an immaterial or intangible technology. However solar technologies, like contemporary media, exist within a paradigm of technical materiality and conceptual immateriality (Franklin 2012, Parikka 2015) grounded firmly in the extractive and the geophysical, through a two-fold interdependence on the geological subject. Firstly, through the geophysical sites on which these technologies are installed and secondly, through the utilization of key conductive minerals such as silver in the hardware of solar panels. My research will challenge the myth that solar-energy is an immaterial source of energy production and critique the practices of this technology through a research and theory-practice based methodology. This two-fold geological relationship will be examined in the context of the Anthropocene (and its other taxonomies) which is defined as the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment, alongside arguments in green capitalism and media archaeology.

Clareese Hill

Clareese Hill is a Practice-Based Researcher. She has backgrounds in filmmaking and broadcast journalism. She is interested in exploring the validity of the word "identity" through her perspective as an Afro-Caribbean American woman and her societal role as projected on her to perform as a Black feminist academic. Clareese's practice includes performance, virtual reality development, writing, and interactive installations. Her relationship with the technology used in her practice seeks to disrupt its intended purpose by putting the activated apparatus in a precious position of being othered through care and futurity, instead of violence and bias. She has shown her work and given performance lectures in London at Royal College of Art, Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, University of Sussex, CUNY Graduate Center, The Chicago Art Department, and at Smack Mellon in Brooklyn. In May 2020, she co-organized Occupying the In-Between, a day-long interactive art research platform facilitated by a Zoom gathering. The prompt of the day questioned the validity of knowledge production and its dissemination practices. She has shown her research internationally at exhibitions in Chicago, New York, California, London, France, and cyberspace. She has also contributed to Journals in London and New York. Clareese was a 2020 Eyebeam Rapid Response fellow (phase 1).

description of work

This research project is a multimedia web virtual reality experience that is a meditation where the audience is able to witness and passive experience that speaks to how to dismantle identities are viewed, performed, projected, embodied through the use of technology acting as a liminal space. The meditation will be available to all who wish to witness it through a web browser. The space of rest will be based on cultural practices of Black and indigenous communities during the time of antiquity, restoring these practices that were once labeled primitive back to their position of being knowledge production. This space will also explore the role of predictiveness through care instead of the amplification of difference

SEBASTIAN ALTHOFF

Sebastian Althoff studied Philosophy & Economics (BA) and Political Theory (MA) at the Universities of Bayreuth, Frankfurt and the EHESS in Paris with a focus on political philosophy and aesthetic theory. His doctoral research, supervised by Friedrich Balke (Bochum) and Maria Muhle (Munich), explored the notion of digital mimicry within the context of opposition in the space of algorithmic governmentality. During this time, he was a member of the research group Media and Mimesis, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), and an associate member of the IDP MIMESIS at the LMU Munich. In 2019, he undertook a research residency at the Visual Cultures department of Goldsmiths College London under the supervision of Emily Rosamond. His work has been published in intermédialités and Performance Research. He also co-edited an anthology on Re/Dissolving Mimesis (2020) published by Wilhelm Fink Verlag.

DESCRIption of work

The aggregation of massive amounts of data by companies such as Google and Amazon is generally considered a danger to the privacy of individual users. They are seen as losing control over their data and images. In Katherine Behar’s Clicks – part of her art series Modeling Big Data (2014) – the avalanche of data, however, seems to be turned into a danger that likewise effects Google and Amazon themselves. The data in their data centers is no longer viewed as an endless recourse to be unearthed through data mining but rather as akin to fat building up in the body or plastic left in garbage dumps all over the world, “a hoarder’s embarrassment”. In this reading of Clicks and Behar’s essay Bigger Than You: Big Data and Obesity, the performer offers herself as an organic data medium, being overcome by data at the same time as she drags the data down. Clicks thus proposes a different kind of economy, not of data ascetism and abstinence but of excess, wondering not if there is too much connection between the body and the digital milieu – in form of wearables and the quantified self – but too little.