Crown

Crown

Madalena Miranda, 2022
video, 5 minutes

A visual quote between geopolitics and a crown static, resting on the shoulders of an identity made in intercontinental transits and tiny ghosts of the hair root. From “This Hair” (Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, 2015).

Quantofreny today and algorithmic control

Today's computational technological platforms collect data that are the subject of treatment and analysis according to different use values such as popularity (visits), authority (interactions), reputation (likes) and behaviour prediction from the drags left by internaut users (digital footprint). This entails the so-called big data, data science, artificial intelligence, and Machine Learning that provide information for decision-making. Big Data encompasses infrastructures, technologies and services created to solve the processing of these large amounts of data. At the heart of its treatment are the algorithms with well-defined mathematical instructions.

As a whole, they mean the generalisation of calculating rationality as a mode of action in the world, a reason that converts everything into predictions, numbers, and efficiency, and which has been becoming an instrument of governance and administration, which already comes from the intense application of statistics and probabilities since the nineteenth century.

Other antecedents of this type of activity are in the US company SimulMatics Corporation, founded during the Cold War by social scientists. This company used algorithms to influence voters and consumers decades before Google or Cambridge Analytics operations.

José Luís Garcia, 2022