Curate
Blackbox algorithms rule the online world. They choose who can see which content, never explaining why. What does this mean for artists, audiences and culture as a whole?
In recent months anxiety around what algorithms will do to the arts has become a hot topic. Art, Literature, Music, all are being generated by AI systems. Even we explored what these algorithms may do to how art is created - just one episode ago.
But, we missed something. Algorithms are not just changing how we create art, they鈥檝e been curating everything we see and hear online for years. But they don't explain why. How have these bits of code reshaped our relationship with culture?
In this episode Aleks discovers the very different values and meanings in what a human, or an algorithm chooses to present to us. Unpacks the anxiety of what our raw data tells us about our desires, compared to what we believe about ourselves. Finds out how gaming the algorithm to succeed may result in creative stagnation, and a narrowed view of the world. But also how some algorithms could break us free of the boxes we have been slotted into, if things could be done a little differently.
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Laura Herman
Laura Herman is a PhD student at the Oxford Internet Institute, where she is exploring the intersection of art, design, technology, and creativity. She tells us about 'The Algorithmic Pedestal' - an exhibition created in collaboration with Fabienne Hess - and how algorithmic curation has reshaped our relationship with culture, but also could be influencing the human creative process itself.
Fabienne Hess
Maxim Zhestkov
Maxim Zhestkov (b. 1985) is a digital artist based in London.聽
He merges his studies in architecture, sculpture, motion graphics, colour, and sound, to dramatise the intersection of the digital and the physical as a critical site for imagining the aesthetic possibilities and psychological implications of a 鈥減hygital鈥� reality.
Maxim Zhestkov鈥檚 work has been presented internationally in shows at major institutions, including Decentral Art Pavilion Venice (2022), Unit London (2021), Contemporary Istanbul (2021), MIT (2019), Modern Art Museum, Shanghai (2019), and the Hermitage Museum (2019).聽
He talks to us about how the algorithmic curation of online platforms influenced his artistic process, and the tension between attention, and intention, that comes with presenting artwork in the digital realm.
Saif Shahin
He tells us about 鈥楽ludge Content鈥� - an emerging trend of video on TikTok that appears to be the epitome of attention grabbing algorithmically driven content, and explains that no one knows where it came from, or what intention was behind its creation.
Broadcast
- Mon 27 Feb 2023 16:3091热爆 Radio 4
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The Digital Human
Aleks Krotoski explores the digital world
