Video still from Cinthia Bodenhorst and Sara Coleman, Tr4ns1ts Tr4nsm1ss1ons
This week A*Desk: Journal of Critical Thinking published the second of five installments of my editorial project, Retraction, which brings together the work of twenty artists and writers who interpret the idea of «retraction» from multiple vantage points in various mediums. (For information about the first installment, visit Retraction 1: The Object.) My introduction for the second installment, Retraction 2: Halting Problem, takes a step toward conceptualizing the algorithm in relation to the “halting problem” in computational theory in order to budge the instrumental assumptions of algorithmic thinking and to point to the openness of the algorithm to non-instrumental uses. The installment presents works by artists, Gerard Freixes, Eugenio Tisselli, and Cinthia Bodenhorst and Sara Coleman.
An excerpt from this week’s introduction:
«This week we begin with the story of an abandoned writing project, halted in the experimental pursuit of an infinite generative process. From the aborted endeavor, scraps of text are discovered containing an unexpected commentary. The second entry responds to the contemporary urgency to retract techno-capitalism’s relentless and corrosive expansionism by presenting an algorithm designed to generate a potentially infinite series of relevant questions, which however is halted at the number 2964. Developed in the midst of the retracted life brought on by the ongoing spread of the coronavirus, the third entry presents a collaborative text written by two artists who weave together speculative threads in an emergent fabric of human lives, pandemic data, data visualization, and questions of biopower that drive their layered and heterogeneous proliferation.»
To read and view the second installment, please visit the A-Desk site at this link:
Retraction 2: Halting Problem.