As part of our ongoing discussion on Letta Shtohryn’s astute incorporation of The Sims into her artistic practice, we take a look at her first machinima, Algorithmic Oracle (2019), which was screened at the 2020 Milan Machinima Festival.
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Algorithmic Oracle exists as an installation featuring nine single channel videos each lasting 8’ 12” and as a single channel composite of the same duration. Like a time travel narrative, it shows multiple scenarios triggered by a fixed event, that is, a fire. However, the outcomes are determined by an AI rather than by human intervention.
Algorithmic Oracle is a commentary on the ontological capabilities of algorithms: as Eli Pariser argued in 2011, machine-curated news-feeds create insular and homogenous info-contexts, known as filter bubbles. To experience reality in such an environment means to reduce the complexity of reality to a handful of narratives, automatically excluding anything or anyone contradicting the dominant paradigm: the very possibility of an anomaly, that is, an information that does not perfectly for within the current dogma, is eliminated.
Shtohryn argues that algorithms have created a series of parallel realities, a multiverse of experiences, in which clusters of like-minded individuals believe their “world” to be the best of all. Worse yet, these individuals tend to dismiss the very possibility of alternative ways of seeing the world: “I don’t see the same content as you, but we act as if we see the same thing”, she writes in the accompanying text…
Matteo Bittanti
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