Matteo Pasquinelli

The Eye of the Algorithm and the Labour of Metadata

A new pla­ne­ta­ry sca­le of com­pu­ta­ti­on de­man­ds a new pla­ne­ta­ry sca­le of po­li­tics. As the cur­rent de­ba­te on the An­thro­po­ce­ne points too, no po­li­ti­cal agen­cy is pos­si­ble wi­thout the re­co­gni­ti­on of a new co­gni­ti­ve per­spec­tive on the who­le pla­net. The eye of mo­dern per­spec­tive was born trough an equi­va­lent pa­ra­digm shift, brin­ging in­no­va­ti­ve tech­ni­ques of op­ti­cal pro­jec­tion from the ma­the­ma­ti­ci­ans of Bagh­dad to Flo­rence.

A fur­ther di­men­si­on of depth was so ad­ded to aes­t­he­tics, many croo­ked pain­tings were strai­gh­te­ned and a new po­li­ti­cal vi­si­on of the collec­tive space was in­au­gu­ra­ted. Si­mi­lar­ly, a fur­ther co­gni­ti­ve di­men­si­on has to be im­por­ted to­day from com­pu­ta­ti­on into po­li­ti­cal thought, in or­der to be able to ‘see’ and grasp the ocea­nic depth of the glo­bal da­tascape and to dis­clo­se the no­vel tech­no-com­ple­xi­ty of the so­ci­al space.

So­me­thing si­mi­lar hap­pe­n­ed al­re­a­dy in cy­ber­ne­tics with the shift from the first or­der to the se­cond or­der cy­ber­ne­tics, that is with the re­co­gni­ti­on of the meta-le­vel of the ob­ser­ver ob­ser­ving a sys­tem of ob­ser­vers. Any cen­tu­ry pro­du­ces its own epis­te­mic rift. The ma­king of a glo­bal da­tascape is cal­ling for a new epis­te­mic eye.

8 December 2014, 18:00 to 20:00 
Hybrid Publishing Lab - Phi­lo­so­phy of the Web Lec­tu­re Se­ries 
Cent­re for Di­gi­tal Cul­tu­res, Sülz­tor­str. 21–35, 2. OG 
21335 Lüne­burg

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A seminar will follow on 9 December, 10-12am.