Introduction to Algorithmic Literacy

Instructor: Valentin Golev Date & Time: Sundays, May 10, 17, 24, 31, June 7, 14, 21, 28 2 PM - 4:30 PM ET

Enroll – 375 USD

DESCRIPTION: The division of cognitive labor, which starts with the two-way ideological isolation of STEM at schools, is an attack on our collective capacity to read. What is getting lost is the medieval multiplicity of readings of a recipe: as an alchemical instruction, an ethical injunction, or an allegory, with different castes of people being able to engage with the same text in a different way. Learning to properly read the technology is the first and necessary step to any usage or critique of it. Algorithms are rarely engaged with as pure works of writing. At the same time, the algorithmic writing rewrites the world. Even the very words appropriated by the algorithms find themselves commonly used in the same restricted or amended way. The limitations that algorithmic thinking imposes on the world are acquired, naturalised and shared by the society as a whole. In this seminar we will learn to “read” algorithms on a variety of levels. From the source code to the typical format of input, from the history of an algorithm’s discovery to the peculiar marks it leaves on the output, from the cognitive economy of labor that the programmers perform to realise it to the infrastructure necessary for its operation at scale – we’ll learn how to understand and recognise an algorithm. We’ll engage with the fundamental algorithms little-known outside of the tech world, as well as the ones that are currently in vogue. This seminar will not try to impose any particular philosophy of computation, or even to explore their variety. Rather than that, it focuses on particular technological artifacts, ethnography, archives, and anecdote. The cultural research around particular algorithms is little-to-not existent, and we’ll have to reconstruct the multi- sided overview ourselves.

Image: Bernhard Martin, Cocks of Harmony, 2019, Courtesy of Dittrich & Schlechtriem

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Enroll – 375 USD