ALGORITHM BLUES
Ewan Golder
Our age is defined by technology, more to the point, we use technology to define ourselves to ourselves and to others, and perhaps technology is using us to define itself. Technology that is evolving faster than our biology, and the cognitive and sensory apparatus we use to orientate ourselves in reality. Likewise, theoretical frameworks we use to make sense of our existence are becoming obsolete faster that our smartphones. The internet has changed the fabric of reality itself as well as the way we perceive it, consume it, and assimilate it. Mass communication and access to information, the likes of which our silicone emancipators could only dream about is here and here to stay, but do you feel emancipated? Do you feel liberated? With ever more means of communication, do you feel more connected? Is there a heavy price to pay for this so-called freedom?
We have now outsourced so much of thinking to apps and algorithms we are now dependant on it, our society depends on it, perhaps in this sense we are already cyborgs. We live fractured lives, our consciousness is constantly divided, our ‘natural’ meat-puppet existence competing for substantiality with our online persona, or multiple online versions, each doing its own thing, with its own priorities and each being assimilated by the an omnivorous superconsciousness, spreading its optic fibre tentacles and penetrating our sensory receptacles, and microwaving us from afar. Each copy of ourselves adrift in the stratosphere subjected to an aggressive interrogation from the algorithms, extracting insights into our deepest desires, transforming them into binary code, and then using it to influence our behaviour to suit its aims, forming new opinions and desires, implanting new thoughts and encroaching ever more into our sacred conscious space, and violating our psychic sovereignty. Experts from psychology and from the gambling world are recruited to install in us addictive habits and to keep us mesmerised in front of the screen, to feed the machine with more and more of our precious data. “If anything is free, you are the product” says Jaron Larnier, author of “Ten Arguments for deleted your social Media”.
Frontiers between nations are irrelevant today unless as fictions used as PR tools, ideas created for the digital realm now superseded our old idea of reality, we are living in a ‘Liquid’ world, “In a recent report the ISD (Institute fro Strategic Dialogue) describes the society it works in as a ‘liquid’ society, invoking a world where old, more solid social roles have slipped of the leash, where information moves so easily it fractures old notions of belonging, where a sense of uncertainty pervades everything and where all sorts of forces can easily reshape you”. Peter Pomerantsev, This is Not Propaganda.
An ideas’ ability to gain some kind of traction, some kind of hold on the imagination of a group is more valuable that it's truthfulness. The future is uncertain in this post truth world, perhaps this is why people are looking backwards instead of forwards to try and get some sort of purchase on the ever shifting terrain. This makes us easy prey to a nefarious forces who galvanise us through political populism, who themselves pursue this agenda not because they believe in it but because it works as a means to gain power and influence - made possible thanks to the possibilities the internet offers (social media targeting, data mining, algorithms, bots, troll farms and dissemination of disinformation).
The fall of the Soviet Union has been called the end of history. The ideological war has been won. Politicians and other forces now whip up hate for ‘the other’ amongst us, as well as nostalgia for an imagined past. The late Mark Fisher suggested we are also nostalgic for a lost future. A future that was promised to us through popular culture, ideas of technological utopias which never arrived. The effect is jarring.
Some of these films explore the technological question using innovative techniques and new aesthetics to give form to our contemporary life. There is also a yearning beneath the noise, a yearning for truth perhaps, a human truth, even a spiritual truth. Something to counter-act these incessant encroachments into our sacred psychic and spiritual space and a longing for more innocent times.
The films come from all over the world and look forward and backwards, often both at the same time, addressing our contemporary experience with technology and the ‘collective digital consciousness’ that is the internet, as well as a search for connection to something more profound perhaps lying just further beyond the digital clouds.
Ewan Golder
About Ewan
Ewan Golder