⚡???? NEW CALL FOR PAPERS: ALGO-RHYTHMS: LIVING IN AND OUT OF SYNC WITH TECHNOLOGY

In his One Year Performance 1980-1981 (Time Clock Piece), Tehching Hsieh imposes upon himself the task of clocking-in using punch-card technology every day, every hour, 24 hours a day, all through 365 days of the year. Forcing his corporeal self into the cold rigid regularity of mechanical clock time, he makes visible the rhythmic bind of the machine.
 

Tehching Hsieh, “One Year Performance 1980–1981,” installation view at 2017 Venice Biennale
(photo © Hugo Glendinning, courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum)
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A by-now-classic performance piece, Hsieh’s durational performance aesthetically reveals technology’s intricate relationship to time and rhythm, and the potential violence of arranging our lives according to the clock and to the machine. The clocking-in mechanism is a mechanical algo-rhythm that shows the segmentation of time into hourly units, and an algo-rhythm that instigates a temporal logic upon which labour is quantified, managed, and compensated.
 
This call for paper is about algorithms and algo-rhythms, and our affective relationships to the algorithmic processes taking place in our mediated lives. While algorithms are often understood as techno-mathematical procedures executed by machines, algo-rhythms highlight the temporalities created by this process. Following Wolfgang Ernst’s media philosophy in Chronopoetics (2016), computers have their own internal clocking systems that allow for encoding/decoding processes to be synced, and for machine operations to run in connection with one another, as an internal rhythm emerges as part of this processing. These algorithms and algo-rhythms operate in the background much like the ticking of a clock, in our smartphone, on our apps, in the signal traffic of the internet… synchronising as devices communicate to each other, but many a time out of sync with our lived bodies.