Data Workers

About

This exhibition shows a selection of algoliterary works made by members of Algolit, an artistic research group with a focus on F/LOSS code and texts, based in Brussels. While artificial intelligences are being created to serve, entertain, record, and know us, they are usually hidden behind interfaces. In these works of fiction, the algoritmic storytellers leave the invisible underworld to become interlocutors. The works show the voice of the robots, algorithmic models that read data, turn words into numbers, make calculations that define patterns and are able to endlessly process new texts thereafter. This exhibition is an attempt to grasp and multiply voices which are absent in our representations of the world. It allows the robots to go into dialogue with us, humans. It allows us to understand their reasoning, to demystify their behaviour, to encounter their personalities, without having to study intensively for years. It is also a tribute to the many machines that Paul Otlet and Henri Lafontaine imagined for their Mundaneum, showing their potential but also their limits.

Stations

The origins of the Mundaneum go back to the late nineteenth century. The project was created by two young Belgian jurists, Paul Otlet (1868-1944), the father of documentation, and Henri La Fontaine (1854-1943), Nobel Peace Prize winner. Itaimed at gathering all the world’s knowledge and file it using the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) system that they had created. At first it was international institutions bureau dedicated to knowledge and fraternity. In the 20th century the Mundaneum became a universal centre of documentation. Its collections are made up of thousands of books, newspapers, journals, documents, posters, glass plates, postcards and other bibliographic cards. These were put together and kept in various buildings in Brussels, including the Palais du Cinquantenaire. The archive only moved to Mons in 1998.

Based on Mundaneum, the two men designed a World City for which Le Corbusier made scale models and plans. The aim of the World City was to gather, at world level, the institutions of intellectual work: libraries, museums and universities. This project was never be realised. The Mundaneum project soon faced the scale of the technical development of its era. It suffered from its own utopia. The Mundaneum is the result of a Visionary dream. It attained mythical dimensions at the time. When looking at the concrete archive that was developed, that collection is very fragmented and incomplete. The same can be said for artifical intelligences today. When reading about them, the visionary dream has been there since the beginning of their development in the 50s.

Nowadays the promise has attained mythical dimensions. When looking at the concrete applications, that collection is truely innovative and fascinating, but rather fragmented and incomplete.

[Algoliterator]