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. The research hub will also invite two external artists to develop new projects and host 2 transdisciplinary public seminars. In parallel, three public research stations will be held at partner institutions: Goldsmiths College, London and at the Department of Human and Social Sciences, Naples. In the final year, there will be three major outcomes: an international conference at the TU Graz, an online platform, and a book gathering heterogeneous (artistic, science-fictional, poetic, scientific and theoretical) contributions from all of the participants and beyond.

The fundamental premise of our long-term research project "The Incomputable" was that the rapid development in the field of computational algorithms has substantially impacted social, cognitive, and political spheres. The notion of the incomputable was employed as a metaphor for that which resists classification, data aggregation, and the digital-computational mode of economic resource/value extraction. The project's goal was thus to enable critical knowledge production through arts-based research, revolving around that which resists this computational regime. Through the workshops at our host institution, TU Graz, as well as through developing joint curriculums and teaching together with our peers from other fields, we managed to start the transdisciplinary debate previously completely absent. The project thus also raised the visibility and reputation of arts-based research across the technological disciplines at the TU. In parallel to working locally through workshops, teaching, artists residency, and public programing, we were productive in establishing international connections and mutual exchange with relevant arts-based research communities in London, New York, Miami, Karlsruhe, Berlin, Potsdam, Basel, and Amsterdam. In addition to continuously partaking in the international discursive and pedagogical settings, we also staged a number of exhibitions and discursive events. As a way to track and archive, in real time, our multifaceted research threads and activities publicly, we produced an online platform. The Incomputable (available at https://incomputable.xyz/) is a repository of our process and an experiment in open research methodology itself. A comprehensive edited volume (forthcoming 2023 with Bloomsbury UK; both in printed and open access format) brings together various disciplines-such as Critical and Political Ecology, Art Theory, Science and Technology Studies, Anthropology, Media Studies, Contemporary Philosophy, Decolonial Thought, Black Studies, Feminist and Queer Theory, Geography and Critical Legal Theory. The book stages this transdisciplinary dialogue in order to tackle the entanglement of the planetary computational systems and the collapse of Earth's climate. Our original hypothesis was thereby expanded in order to open the space in the humanities for a critical debate on artificial intelligence as itself a technology of extraction-from the earth's minerals to the labor of low-wage information workers.