FWF - PEEK_The Incomputable - The Incomputable - Art in the Age of Algorithms

A tectonic epistemic and political shift has been generated by the transformation from network-form to aggregate-data form of digital capitalism in which massive servers collect, mine and algorithmically process enormous quantities of user generated data, turning them into value. Algorithms have started to govern our lives, transforming the relationship between technology, power and economy, and complicating the distinction between known and the unknown. Everything seems to be computable and turned into a form of knowledge for further computational exploitation. There is, however, an incomputable, unpredictable remainder of computation that still demands human intervention. The Incomputable Art in the Age of Algorithms asks: Is there a relation between artistic creativity and the creativity of the incomputable? Can bringing art-based investigation closer to that ungovernable remainder that breaks the code tell us something about the real relations of power underneath the sea of endless computation? Is arts role in the future going to be expanding the crevices between the numbers? The research departs from the assumption that the art in the age of algorithms can be socially and politically relevant only by reinventing the notion of creativity. Could this mean merging paranoid imagination - searching for the unknown unknowns of the interactions between technology and society, with the creative imagination, thus making the hidden relationships behind it visible. How could this to be done? Through cognitive/visual maps, public interviews, online platforms, audio, video, cinematic, performative or narrative forms? The project generates both artistic research and a discursive platform around these speculative propositions and seeks methods for art to cognitively map and make visible the complexity of algorithmic governance. A transdisciplinary research hub will be established at the Graz University of Technology (TU), forming collaboration between the projects host IZK- Institute for Contemporary Art with the TU based science and technology institutes dedicated to the research of algorithms. The projects core research team is based at the IZK - Prof. Milica Tomic (artist/project coordinator), Dejan Markovic (artist/uni.ass.), and the Antonia Majaca, (project leader/curator/visiting prof.) will conduct interviews and experiment with the transdisciplinary methodology of visual/cognitive mapping the current research of algorithms at the TU and beyond, and communicate the findings through public presentations at the IZK and through the final project outcomes.