How Algorithms Shape Our World

I encourage you to view this talk by Kevin Slavin that is a nice entrée into the world of critical algorithm studies. How are algorithms shaping our lives? What does this mean for us as we think though computation, its socio-technical effects, and their expression in electronic art?  Interestingly, Slavin begins with the work of an artist to introduce the notion of the embeddedness of algorithms in our everyday lives.

“It’s what the money motivates, that we’re actually terraforming the Earth itself with this kind of algorithmic efficiency. And in that light, you go back and you look at Michael Najjar’s photographs, and you realize that they’re not metaphor, they’re prophecy. They’re prophecy for the kind of seismic, terrestrial effects of the math that we’re making. And the landscape was always made by this sort of weird, uneasy collaboration between nature and man. But now there’s this third co-evolutionary force: algorithms — the Boston Shuffler, the Carnival. And we will have to understand those as nature, and in a way, they are.”