The Cultural Work of Algorithms

During his time at the Academy, Uricchio will continue to explore how algorithmic mediation is fundamentally changing numerous domains. Despite increasing debate over the rapid increase in areas where enormous quantities of aggregated data are stored and processed, we have yet to comprehend fully the significance of the unprecedented access to such data (by both commercial corporations and political administrations). Uricchio’s project addresses the need for systematic analysis of the algorithmic processes that make sense of that data, combining a historically grounded approach with a wider ambition to relate the “linkage between a mode of representation and an epistemic (and social) order.” The past few decades have seen the rise of new ways to represent and encounter the world, ways dependent on algorithmic interventions between the viewing subject and the object viewed. Algorithms, of course, can be put to many ends, and in this study Uricchio is particularly interested in algorithms as facilitators of large-scale human participation and collaboration in the media sector (Wikipedia, interactive documentaries, collaborative photo systems, story generators, search engines). Marking a clear distinction between the algorismic (calculable) and the algorithmic, he argues that the algorithmic now continuously mediates between the subject and object, thus complicating the object-subject binary. Writ large, these algorithmically enabled practices mark a radical departure from the project of the modern. Uricchio goes beyond how algorithmic practices enable or harvest mass participation to consider how they in fact intervene in and transform the subject-object relationship upon which “the modern” has been built.