Olivia Abächerli: A Machine in the World

20 minute presentation for AEROPONIC ACTS  - growing roots in air, DAI's 3 day marathon of lecture-perfomance acts, May 2019.

Polsima, the political simulator machine, is able to calculate future consequences of every single political decision by a very complex algorithm. The piece is a poem.

Ana Teixeira Pinto, Antonia Majaca, Laura Harris and Hypatia Vourloumis responded to the question:

Would you like to have polsima?

Report by Ayesha Hameed:

Unreliable statistics is a key resource for Polsima, a machine proposed by the artist that calculates the consequences of every single political decision with a very complex algorithm. The main focal point is a two-screen video projection on the history of Polsima, followed by a humorous first-person interview with the artist who extols the virtues of this overtly useless machine. She effectively deploys corporate advertising language – e.g., ‘Complexity at all levels and all scales’ and ‘The future is fragile but will be true’ – ending with an ad for the website. Her image is overlayed with a diagram of the political simulator, which, among other things, intends to render language obsolete. The detail makes the presentation parodic, while a second smaller projection provides a more abstract rendition with satellites and a globe turning red. 

Antonia Majaca found the presentation refreshing, and suggested Polsima could be a friend of Algorithma – a surrealist pairing. She contextualized Polsima as invented in the background of terrorist insurgency, which raised the question of data terrorism as counterinsurgency. Stefan Hedenreich’s idea of the post-money economy and the algorithmic practices that fuel it was brought up as a parallel to Polsima’s politics without politicians. The strength of the presentation, concluded Majaca, lay in the interfaces, including the machine itself. 

Laura Harris thought the humour was well placed, and the artist made good use of the Ted Talk format, including the use of diagrams. Harris read this presentation in relation to Robin Blackburn’s work on the baroque – the creation of this device in the face of that kind of complex building. In the blunt construction of the instrument, Harris did not see its insurrectionary aspect.

Hypatia Vourloumis said Polsima looked like a handmade bomb. She saw the humour in the successful operation of rhetoric in the work as a whole. Its relationship to speculation for Vourloumis evoked Giorgio Agamben’s notion of politics as means without end, causing her to assert that ‘Polsima is in contrast to this as it goes straight to the end.’ This position sparked her further questions: ‘Does the diagram work overlaid on top of the talking head? Politics here is close to policing – as the future of the invention of this device is foreseeable; from Polsima’s perspective, what is a vision of a better world?’

Ana Texeira Pinto thought the overlapping of the map and the territory was fascinating and sourced the humour in the near reality of the invention. ‘Game theory as speculative mode – prediction theory – draws on this,’ she said. She was impressed with the aesthetics of the Ted Talks diagram in a presentation that ‘resonates with real-life cybertechnologies … that remove human agency.’