Visceralizing Algorithms

• In Event: Regenerating Algorithms

Abstract

Emotional and visceral experience have often been overlooked as elements in the design and use of digital technologies. Yet to make data more visceral is to grapple with the injustices and inequalities persisting in many of the lives mediated by digital technologies. The concept of viscerality, of ‘gut’ feelings, is not a conceptually neutral one; it is tied intimately to the imbrication of intersections among race, class, gender and sexuality within hierarchies of knowledge and power.

Affect theorist Sianne Ngai argues that viscerality – a category of experience which, due to its ‘specificity and corporeality seem to have made [it] resistant to theory’ – serves as an antidote to what she calls ‘abstraction’ as a category of human experience. In the context of digital mediation I carry her argument further: the tendency towards abstraction becomes materialized in the very mechanisms through which digital technologies work or are understood to work, alongside the ways in which these technologies perform the schematic classification of human bodies, behaviors, and emotions into machine-legible traits.

How, then, might an algorithm’s parameters translate into a form viscerally appreciable to embodied humans, one reflecting these sociotechnical realities? Inspired by the simple alogorithm, find_max(), I will present several possible interpretations inspired by haptic technologies and mobilizing the visceral power of various human senses. In doing so, I take the diversity of human bodies, with the attendant diverse experiences of those bodies, seriously – not as uncomplicated objects of scholarship, but as fellow subjects to think and feel with.

References:

Ngai, S. (2015). Visceral Abstractions. GLQ: a Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21(1), 33–63.

Stark, L. (2018). Visceral Data. In T. D. Sampson, S. Maddison, & D. Ellis (Eds.), Affect and Social Media (pp. 42–51). London & New York.

Wilson, E. A. (2015). Gut Feminism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Author

• Charles Luke Alan Stark