The Algorithmic Sabotage Research Group (ASRG) is an ongoing, conspiratorial, aesthetico-political, practice-led research framework focused on the intersection of digital culture and information technology. #
It explores the diversity of practices and the role of artistic activism in exposing, critiquing, disrupting and countering the encroachments of algorithmic systems of power, control and exploitation, with the objective of strengthening, promoting and protecting human rights and fundamental freedoms by offering interdisciplinary pathways to empower the public.
Graphic: © Algorithmic Sabotage Research Group | The typeface used is Avara from Velvetyne Foundry: https://velvetyne.fr/fonts/avara/Transversal Approaches #
Relying on a distinctly decolonial, anti-fascist, queer and trans-feminist, transnational and intersectional perspective, the Algorithmic Sabotage Research Group (ASRG) gains traction by starting from existing points of struggle at the margins, creating radical solidarity co-ordinations and bulwarks of direct militant confrontation to promote a prefigurative techno-political stance of refusal militantly opposed to any fascist logic that “automates inequality” and applies data-driven disproportionate burdens and violence to the most vulnerable demographics for the grand task of stabilised quantification and optimisation of the entire population, to restore collective subjectivity and reclaim political agency from the engines of abstraction, in the context of AI and other computational technologies whose statistical logics reveal continuities with racism, colonial relations and white supremacy.
The Algorithmic Sabotage Research Group (ASRG) contributes to collective emancipation by foregrounding algorithmic agency and resistance not as episodic, but as ingrained into the very fabric of our everyday experiences, signaling a fundamental computational shift towards a “techno-politics of fronts” in a decolonial politics of algorithms and atmospheres against sites of “algorithmic coloniality”, opening up new possibilities beyond pre-emptive techno-solutionism, the meaningless rot of over-performance and the capitalisation of life without limits by the techno-elite regimes, to create a multi-dimensional and informed understanding of the far-reaching impacts and harmful features at the core of the systems of oppression and axes of identity of the “algorithmic empire”, characterised by heteropatriarchal exclusions, erasures, violence and discrimination, fake accuracy and simulated objectivity, orchestrating a chilling symphony of oppression, with marginalised communities worldwide bearing the brunt of the automated violence.
Research Questions #
The framework within which the Algorithmic Sabotage Research Group (ASRG) operates is related to the analysis of the concept of “algorithmic sabotage” as a means of consciously working on artistic and techno-political strategies and aesthetics against the authoritarian patriarcho-colonial Big Tech and the algorithmic totalitarianism of techno-bourgeois domination, focusing on artistic-activist resistances that can express a different mentality, a collective “counter-intelligence”.
The research is guided by the following questions:
How can “algorithmic sabotage”, art and activism be combined to challenge and resist the paradigm of an all-controlling and regulating technology?
How does technological disobedience through “algorithmic sabotage” contribute to new forms of action, digital tools and content?
Acknowledging that refusal has a technopolitics: what are the wider implications of “algorithmic sabotage” as an act of dissent and refusal for politics, society and the arts?
How can “algorithmic sabotage” through artistic activism, strengthen self-organised and technologically-based tactics of producing justice and promoting accountability?
Contact #
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Social Media
You can find us as @asrg@tldr.nettime.org on Mastodon. * tldr.nettime is an instance for artists, researchers, and activists interested in exploring the intersections of technology, culture, and politics.
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About this site #
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