Performing Algorithms: Automation and Accident
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Performing Algorithms: Automation and Accident Sean Dockray ORCID: 0000-0002-1955-9192 Doctor of Philosophy September 2019 Faculty of the Victorian College of the Arts and Melbourne Conservatorium of Music The University of Melbourne Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 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. The thesis focuses on both generative art and the lecture performance, which converge in performing algorithms but are generally not discussed in connection with one another. They emerged in parallel as artistic methods, however, at a time when management and computation were taking root in the workplace in the 1960s. Furthermore, as the Internet became widespread from the 1990s, generative art and the lecture performance each found renewed prominence. With human language and gesture increasingly modelling itself on the language of computation and work constantly reshaped by the innovations of capital, this project identifies “not working” both in terms of the technological breakdown and also as a condition of labour under automation. A discussion of the first fatal accident involving a self-driving vehicle illustrates this dual condition. Shifting from glitch art’s preoccupation with provoking errors to a consideration of not working, this research proposes artistic strategies that learn to occupy rather than display the accident. i Declaration This is to certify that: (i) this thesis comprises only my original work towards the Doctor of Philosophy, except where indicated in the Preface; (ii) due acknowledgment has been made in the text to all other material used; and (iii) this thesis is fewer than 50,000 words in length, exclusive of tables, maps, bibliographies, and appendices as approved by the Research Higher Degrees Committee. ii Preface This research was funded by the Australia Postgraduate Award. The “Melting Points” section of the “Essaying Algorithms” chapter has been adapted from a catalog essay I wrote for the exhibition, Technologism, at the Monash University Museum of Art in 2015. iii Acknowledgments 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. Thank you, first and foremost, Fiona, Siobhan, and Jasper. Thank you Danny Butt and Stephen Haley for seeing this project through, as well as for the years of conversation. Thank you to Liquid Architecture, especially Joel Stern, and James Parker for the significant support of different iterations of the creative work in this project. Other important people and institutions for the creative component of Performing Algorithms are Eve Sullivan at Art Link; Lisa Rosendahl; Aileen Burns and Johan Lundh, while they were at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; Charlotte Day and Francis Parker at Monash University Museum of Art; Jane Barlow at the Plimsoll Gallery; Serena Wong at the Riddoch Art gallery; Helen Hughes, Patricia Reed, Liang Luscombe, Angela Harutyunyan, and Fiona Whitton. Thank you to Benjamin Forster, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak, Dubravka Sekulic, Sebastian Lutgert, Jan Gerber, Dušan Barok, Benjamin Bratton, Zach Blas, Matteo Pasquinelli, Mattin, Matthew Fuller, Olga Goriunova, Ashok Sukumaran, Shaina Anand, Felix Stalder, Cornelia Sollfrank, Anthony Iles, Josephine Berry-Slater, Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Anthony Davies, Simon Worthington, and Paul Mylecharane for the discussions and inspiration around politics of technology. Some of these encounters were sustained, others brief, but all deeply informative for me. iv My involvement in The Public School, in the years just prior to my move to Melbourne and beginning this research, was similarly transformative and productive of the theoretical framework with which I embarked on the project. Particular thanks to Caleb Waldorf, Chandler McWilliams, Vladada Gallegos, Jordan Biren, Nikita Pashenkov, Elise Co, Naoko Miyano, Sarah Kessler, Ken Ehrlich, Solomon Bothwell, Jason Smith, Marc and Robby Herbst, Christina Ulke, Fiona Geuß, Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga, Lars Fischer, Taeyoon Choi, Scott Rigby, Melanie Bouteloup. The guidance and support I have received at various moments in various forms over the years from Fiona Macdonald, Jan Bryant, Terri Bird, Alex Martinis Roe, Nick Mangan, Tom Nicholson, Callum Morton, Lisa Radford, Geoff Lowe, Ian Haig, Martine Corompt, Nikos Papastergiadis, Irit Rogoff, Tom Leeser, Casey Reas, Erkki Huhtamo, Rebeca Mendez, Phil Taylor, Tom Pilla, Mark Wigley, and Beatriz Colomina has been deeply appreciated. Thanks to Edward Colless and especially Toby Juliff for supervising this project along the way. Not long after starting the PhD, I was drawn into an international lawsuit that is still ongoing. It interrupted the research through stress, financial difficulties, and the plaintiff’s effort to have me expelled from the University of Melbourne. I am still here, however, and I have to thank the University of Melbourne; my lawyer in Montreal, Cory Verbauwhede; and all of the people who donated to my legal defense fund over these last four years. If it weren’t for you (and Cory’s flexibility) then I surely would have not made it this far. Twenty years ago, I dedicated my undergraduate thesis to my mother who had passed away not long before I started the project. My father died less than a year before I began this one and I warmly acknowledge his unquestioning support. Finally, I respectfully acknowledge the Boonwurrung and Wurundjeri peoples of the Kulin Nations, their ancestors and elders, who are part of the longest continuing culture in the world. It was as an uninvited guest on their unceded territory that I wrote this document. v Table of Contents List of Figures 1 Introduction 4 Generative Art 8 Control Societies 13 Automatic Societies 20 Black Boxes 24 Facebook 32 Critical 37 Adversarial 46 Essaying Algorithms 52 Lecture Performance 65 Preemption 82 Making Data 91 Automation 100 Accident 116 Bibliography 134 Creative work can be accessed at: http://phd.e-rat.org vi List of Figures Figure 1: Pere Borrell del Caso, Huyendo de La Crítica (Escaping Criticism), 1874. ................................................................................................................................ 5 Figure 2:The access cards that I have acquired over the past few years at various Australian universities. .......................................................................................... 17 Figure 3: Screengrab of Rodney Brooks from ‘MIT’s Cog (1)’ on YouTube.com. .. 25 Figure 4: Flocking boids image created by Craig W. Reynolds at the Graphics Division of Symbolics, Inc. From Craig W. Reynolds, “Flocks, Herds, and Schools: A Distributed Behavioral Model,” in ACM SIGGRAPH ’87, vol. 21(4) (Anaheim, California: Computer Graphics, 1987), 25–34, http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~dt/siggraph97-course/cwr87/. ..................................... 26 Figure 5: Construction site of the Facebook data centre, Luleå, Sweden. Sean Dockray, Fieldnotes from the Cloud, 2012. Video still. .......................................... 34 Figure 6: Lule River, Sweden. Sean Dockray, Fieldnotes from the Cloud, 2012. Video still. .............................................................................................................. 35 Figure 7: SSAB steel mill, Luleå, Sweden. Sean Dockray, Fieldnotes