video
predicting the future vs. producing realities
Data Oracles is a video essay which compares Predicitve Analytics (the practice of predicting the future by means of Big Data) with ancient forms of divination. The video is a ritual, a spell, a deformation of the rational computational version of the future. It is strangely fascinating how often non-rational and non-western methods of knowledge production are often seen as less valid but how far-advanced technologies like Predicitve Analytics are actually based a lot on correlation, similar to divinatory methods. Moreover, there is a whole history of humans using algorithms, in order to get insights into the future. I am interested in ancient technologies of divination and their approach to the binary code, which embraces the ambivalence and the transformation from one to the other and back with fluid boundaries - in contrast to the binary computer code. Technology can’t save us, it just lets us know, we are doomed.
by: Astarte Posch
collaborators: Baptiste Guillemet, Elisa Pieper, Luis Krummenacher, Isabelle Lange
Art In Context master thesis 2020 at Universität der Künste Berlin (DE)
Slipping into the role of an old white/wise fortune teller. Who can claim to predict the future today?
