Algorithms, Enclosures

Algorithms, Enclosures: Digital Infrastructure
and the Technlogical Imagination

This class will investigate the increasingly
interconnected digital networks that shape and
reshape the global economy. Considering the
material, ecological and political implications
of this evolving technological system, we will
seek to understand both how digital
infrastructures actually work on a technical
level and uncover the cultural assumptions
surrounding networks. What political and social
networks are given form through digital
infrastructures? How are artists visualizing and
mapping the infrastructure of the internet to
make visible hidden relationships and power
dynamics? We will investigate increasingly
complex global technological systems as a way to
think about notions of the public, spatiality and
labor. Structured as a seminar, with readings and
in-class discussion, the class will also involve
field trips to locations associated with digital
infrastructures. In addition, we will consider
the broader question the commons and how the
liberating promise of the internet and networks
have so often delivered novel and not so novel
forms of enclosure.