Experiments in Algorithmic Life

How can automation be turned against itself? The premise of this project – a collection of software and hardware pieces in various states of development – is to turn the current rush of automating technologies back on the question of autonomy in the philosophical sense: the law you give yourself.

Automation usually names the removal of human agency. I’m interested in the opposite possibility: whether the same tools that increasingly efface the line between agent and environment can be enlisted to widen the space of self-determination rather than shrink it. For now it’s a working hypothesis, and a name for a set of experiments I am running, using the Experiment Mag interface.

More soon.