ANNETTE MARKHAM

"As we surf, swipe, click, and post, digital traces create temporal shadows behind us. As these data leave our bodies, they develop lives of their own. Tangling with other data, clusters of cultural significance are generated. As data formats change, or we cede personal and cultural memory to the machinic, the algorithmic, the corporate, what is transformed? What is remembered (re-membered), represented (re-presented)? In the age of AI, who or what has control of cultural memory, and with what consequence?

Algorithmic Gesturing troubles the idea of singular connections between memory and archives as well as the ethics of changing data formats. As an elderly woman tries to donate a memory to be archived—Germans occupying her Danish hometown during WWII, her story is continually interrupted, morphed, overlaid with multiple voices and images. While brief moments of her original videorecorded conversation might be glimpsed, most of the video data has been stripped to the gestural by a predictive algorithm that focuses only on the data points generated by her hand gestures and head movements. Audio overlays include excerpts from The Organic Notebooks (Agnes Denes), Staying with the Trouble (Donna Haraway), and the artist’s own essays. The consequent remix intends to raise questions about the complex politics of datafication of memories and the power of AI to morph and shift the shades and characters of cultural history." --Annette Markham

This video is a remix by Annette Markham, adapted from excerpts of a 2018 audio/ video installation in Aarhus, Denmark, by Ann Light, Annette Markham, Mórna O’Connor, Robert Ochshorn, and Gabriel Pereira. The audio/video installation is part of The Museum of Random Memory, a series of arts-based research interventions (2016-2019) created by Diogo Agostinho, Dalida María Benfield, Chris Bratton, Martin Brynskov, Gita Chandra, Ramona Riin Dremljuga, JV Fuqua, Anu Harju, Elyzabeth Holford, Ksinnia Kalugina, Justin Lacko, Deborah Lanzeni, Bente Larsen, Ann Light, Kristjan Maalt, Larisa Kingston Mann, Annette Markham, Nathália Novais, Robert Ochshorn, Mórna O’Connor, Kasper Ostrowski, Gabriel Pereira, Mads Rehder, Sarah Schorr, Andrew Sempere, Sava Saheli Singh, Maria Hougaard Sørensen, Kristoffer Thyrrestrup, and Elizabeth Whitney. Voice and video of Trine Le Febour was recorded in 2017 by MoRM researchers at CounterPlay Festival in Denmark. Annette Markham is a digital culture researcher and well-known scholar focused on ethics and politics of digital identity and technology design. Annette has facilitated, founded, or directed international initiatives that combine scholarly activism, public arts interventions and critical pedagogy, such as the Skagen Institute for Transgressive Methods (2013-), the Future Making Research Consortium (2014-), The Museum of Random Memory (2016-2019), and in the early days of the 2020 pandemic, Massive and Microscopic Sensemaking, in response to the impact of COVID-19 on everyday lived experience. Primarily a writer, she is author of many short and long form works, including the book Life online: Researching real experience in virtual space (Alta Mira, 1998) and the edited collections Internet inquiry: Conversations about method (Sage, 2009, with Nancy Baym), and Metaphors of internet: Ways of being in the age of ubiquity (Peter Lang, 2020, with Katrin Tiidenberg). Originally from the United States, Annette currently holds an appointment as Professor of media studies and communication and co-director of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. Learn more at https://annettemarkham.com or https://futuremaking.space