The median-finding algorithm ended everything for me: a lifetime-spanning, automatic search for a desired form; a repetitive whiplash of scraping and peeling and never finding the correct pattern to yield that for which I was searching with an animalistic hunger.
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An algorithm is a series of instructions; that is less Ikea manual and more living, breathing body that it is broken and heaving; you have followed algorithms for your entire life and you have become one without your realizing it.
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A woodcut breathes in the same way that an algorithm does: a binary 1 and 0 division of information, a subtraction and addition of tic marks, of holes in the punch card. Information after all, finds its roots in “inform:” the word itself derived from the myth of Jupiter smashing his hammer to render physicality. Inform meant to give form, to break to give substance.
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Algorithmic transparency is less about www and more about DNA: always simple instructions boiled down to their most bare-bones skeletal frame. An algorithm has an anatomy that is hidden and composed and ordered and structured and pure so pure so damn pure that when I see one, I want to etch it into my skin and bones and type it into the muscles and registers of the cache.
Da Vinci had it right in trying to collapse the world into the stolen anatomy from a morgue: post-internet post-human pre-post-body, watch me punch through the screen and claw out all the wires inside.