Contingent Systems: Art and/as Algorithmic Critique is a panel series that will explore critical intersections between creative practice and algorithmic culture. Starting on September 17th, 2021 and occurring every second Friday for ten weeks, the series will consider the various ways that artists have worked in both historical and contemporary contexts to render the algorithmic intelligible, opening space for reflexive critique, meaningful resistance, and imaginative repurposing.

This panel series responds to recent calls for a demystification of the algorithmic undercurrents of contemporary culture (e.g., Crawford 2021; Benjamin 2019). Working as invisible engines that sort, rank, and instrumentalize massive amounts of environmental, biometric, and behavioral data (Hallinan & Striphas 2016), algorithmic technologies have become culture machines, increasingly responsible for enabling and pre-emptively choreographing many of the practices that comprise our everyday lives (Finn 2017; Hansen 2015). While countless scholars have identifed the troubling consequences that algorithmic systems pose for racialized, gendered, sexualized, classed and laboring subjects (e.g., Noble 2018; Bucher 2018; Browne 2015), developing strategies of resistance has been complicated by the seeming impossibility of fully grasping, critiquing, countering, or even opting-out of algorithmic operations (Zuboff 2018; Henning 2018).

An expanded repertoire of methods and models is needed for engaging meaningfully with algorithmic technologies and techniques. Contingent Systems: Art and/as Algorithmic Critique looks to creative practice to provide new ways of understanding and engaging with this context. Not only does artistic practice have a long history of exposing and critiquing technological media (Paul 2016), but researchers regularly leverage creative works as a means of illustrating or expanding upon scholarly claims (e.g., Hui 2020).