Opening Regimes of Prediction

About

Systems of prediction boom in times of political uncertainty and neo-liberal efficiency optimisation, presenting a means of determining future developments. Digitalisation, data mining and processes accelerating in the direction of singularity promise a more efficient, secure future through quantification, including calculation and forecast systems. Through calculated probabilities, actions are not just anticipated but are actually undertaken by algorithms. This is linked to the dissolution of the subject into a statis­tical body with a profile, whereby it is not the person as such that counts as much as the person as a supplier of data. Calculability is thus established as a desirable absolute value and unpredictability styled as a risk factor.

But what is calculable, and what isn’t? Can analysis of data lead to reliable forecasts, for example can it predict whether a relationship will last, how certain stockst will develop in the future, whether someone may commit a crime? The more insecure reality is, the more secure data-based algorithmic calculation models and solutions appear. So on the one hand we have people marginalised to the benefit of personalised data, and on the other the hyper-personalisation of the political personal at the cost of democratic political agendas.

The works shown in the exhibition examine this constantly shifting zone between self-determination and external domination, to make visible the associated systems of power and disempowerment. To what extent are forecasts fetishised and instrumentalised, predictability invoked and what consequences are to be expected, when regimes of prediction determine our lives, when we become datasets in an algorithmically pre-emptive determined system.