THE DIGITAL DIVIDE
symposium
Session: Escaping Algorithms
– Anna Lena Schiller, Head of Tech at AlgorithmWatch
-Grow Sarauw, artist

(video 1 of 2)

This symposium, The Digital Divide, in three parts pushes algorithms into plain sight and considers their production and use as political acts, raising questions about claims to infrastructural neutrality, and highlighting programmed bias and resulting social injustice.

With presentations given by Anna Lena Schiller, Head of Tech at AlgorithmWatch and by Gro Sarauw, Copenhagen-based artist and organizer, with Copenhagen-based curator Lotte Løvholm as respondent, the “Escaping Algorithm” session explores on how algorithmic agency impinges on collective existence: Whose eyes and (artificial) minds are where, why, and for how long? How do and will algorithms exercise control in everyday life and in relation to global civic issues such as surveillance and migration? Conversely, how can such technological tools be conceived or appropriated as means of protection, and thus become allies of the right to invisibility?

Anna Lena Schiller discussed how the secrets of big tech algorithms can be unveiled in order to make processes of automated decision-making accountable – also in order to mobilise algorithms for the public good, and suggested the possibilities for ‘confusing algorithms’.

THE DIGITAL DIVIDE symposium was the launching event of the series of programs of the 2-year Creative Europe project ATTENTION AFTER TECHNOLOGY, a cross-border collaboration between @kunsthalltrondheim @art_hub_copenhagen @tropicalpapers_ @stateofconceptathens @swissinstitute funded by the European Union.