What's in that drawer?
Algorithmic drag, 2021, with Vincenzo Ottino, Aditi Sahoo and Jiangyue Wu. I performed, coordinated, co-created and edited it.
A video snippet from 2050 where an algorithm (A.I. Designed Avatar) presents speculative student work from 2021 as three real historical objects to a young child. Much to the annoyance of their father.
As our cognition and selfhood continue to extend into technology-mediated processes and external repositories, our digital imprints coincide as the dataset. A data collective stored outside of our bodies that is subsumed to train algorithms. Algorithms owned by techno-capitalist organisations.
This process of training AI is self-referential—an algorithmic ouroboros—where our physical environment and bodies respond materially and biologically to computation which in turn responds to the data generated.
So what would happen if we removed ourselves from this dataset? What if we become black boxes and through technology or legislation embody our data, only accessible to those we choose. After this point, would the algorithms continue to consume historical data, generating increasingly distorted and incomprehensible artefacts? Or would there be enough data available on a defunct “internet” for a flourishing ecosystem that feeds upon itself and generates something new?
What’s in that drawer? has no answer. Instead, it explores a fractal path of techno-diversity, using absurdity and speculation to explore themes of data-governance and techno-determinism.
The hackathon
Hybrid Futures asked students for a human-machine encounter in 2050. It ran at Central Saint Martins, and Dr Betti Marenko, a Reader there who curated it, gave this one the prize.
We were really blown away by this in particular … I’m going to tell you… You have really surprised us, what’s in that drawer, wins £1000
Why?
The mind bending density and conceptual layering expressed by your piece are indeed remarkable, the sophisticated play of temporal scales generate deliberate incoherence and visual cacophony while however, tightly controlled and very engaged, I had to watch it a few times actually. Not only does it tell a story of a future human-machine encounter, it really succeeds in building an entirely believable and at the same time utterly unfamiliar world.
By drawing on a multitude of different themes, swiftly and always with a fun register, it traces many questions with a great intellectual complexity almost building a new genre. So it was a really fantastic output. Congratulations you guys.