The Algorithmic State: Digital Repair with Kader Attia

April 3, 2023.

Natural, human and digital forms of repair are all based on a process of examination, reflection, feedback and correction. But unlike human repair, which typically has an ethical dimension as well as a physical one, digital repair is most often driven by the efficiency and acceleration of capital and profit. Corporate algorithms and AIs are routinely written, repaired and refined not toward a horizon of moral health, but—regardless of social impact—toward the astronomically increasing, divisive and polarizing accumulation of wealth.

MA Curatorial Practice presents a talk with artist Kader Attia on notions of repair, both in terms of physical objects and societies, that help us to reconsider damage, dysfunction and trauma in relation to the ways in which AIs are being deployed now and in the future. After all, AIs have already shown the traumas they can cause. To think of AIs as ethical actors rather than simply capitalist ones, and how digital repair might function with this mandate, is the challenging subject Attia addresses in this talk.

Kader Attia is an award-winning artist and a cultural practitioner. In 2016, he founded La Colonie, a discursive space in Paris. In the same year, Attia was recognized with the Marcel Duchamp Prize, Paris, followed in 2017 by the Prize of the Miró Foundation, Barcelona, and the Yanghyun Art Prize, Seoul. He was the artistic director of the 2022 Berlin Biennial, “Still Present.”