How the new Facebook Graph Search promotes network thinking but keeps you within the filter bubble of your immediate surrounding.
Recommender systems are the basic building blocks of most online businesses today. They influence the news we read, the posts we see, the things we buy, the music we listen to. Based on the dataset of what is known about us, recommender system finds something we might be interested in. Technically recommender system is a combination of learning algorithms, statistical tools, and recognition algorithms – the areas commonly ascribed to the study of artificial intelligence.
We decided to study this emergent form of consciousness and conduct an attempt to communicate with a recommender system through the interview format. The results are presented in this report.
Interfaces are all-pervading and their ability to enhance our communication and lives creates an almost religious devotion to technology. The ability to grant an instant gratification and expand our mind puts technology on the same level as drugs: highly addictive, could be dangerous in high dosage, very helpful and sometimes mind-blowing when consumed moderately. My proposition, drawing upon the ideas of Agamben, Foucault, and Kurzwell, is to de-sacralise what we’ve learned so far from the interfaces and to make it profane. Let’s embody the interfaces and bring the magic into the everyday life to allow the free reign of polysingularity.
We are happy to announce our new Text Atlas project. It is now available as a blog on Tumblr and will later be published as a book and presented in exhibition format.
We design and implement computer and living interfaces that introduce the framework of networks into everyday interactions.