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Jan Tumlir and Jeffrey Stuker have collaborated on numerous projects over the years. Together, they ran a series of public seminars on the topic of mimicry, which were held in various locations around Los Angeles, including the Public School (2019), Gattopardo (2022), the Fulcrum Press (2023), and Ehrlich Steinberg (2024). Many of their thoughts on the matter were collected in the third issue of the London-based journal Effects, which they coedited. Included in this publication is their “ABC of Mimicry,” a three-letter glossary, which features an entry on the historical, metaphorical, and etymological origins of the word algorithm near its start. The following article expands upon its principal concerns. Three more entries will be published here in swift succession over the next few months.
ALGORITHM 1: ON THE ANCIENT MYSTERIES
1.1 WE KNOW THAT the algorithm relates to algebra, which is defined in the dictionary as “formal mathematics; the analysis of equations; the art of reasoning about quantitative relations by the aid of a compact and highly systematized notation.” Algebraic equations of one form or another were employed as far back as ancient Egypt, but they were organized into a formal system considerably later. The man generally credited for this transition is the Persian mathematician Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, whose foundational text Al-Kitāb al-mukhtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-jabr waʾl-muqābala (The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing) was delivered in 830 CE. The word algebra derives from the al-jabr in this title, which, by extension, also informs the word algorithm. Yet when the latter is replaced by the abbreviation algol (Algorithmic Language), a whole other order of reference comes into view, involving celestial movements and mythic monstrosities. In addition to designating a language of numbers, this is the name given to the “variable star” in the constellation of Perseus, i.e., the star associated with the decapitated head of the Gorgon that the Greek hero holds by its snaking hair. algol relates to the Arabic al-ghül, which signifies demon or ghoul. These linguistic conjunctions might seem coincidental at first blush, yet they are far from insignificant. We begin our historical excavation of the algorithm at this etymological crossroads, where variable computation intersects with the ancient mysteries.
Like all myths, that of Medusa plays upon the riddle of origins. But this riddle clearly has less to do with our organic beginnings than our “second nature” adaptations. Here, a source of primordial terror—the gaze that petrifies—is deflected by way of the highly polished shield that Perseus wields against the creature. This shield is effectively a mirror, an implement we might want to consider as a rudimentary model for every apparatus of representation and reproduction to follow, while Medusa could stand for the state of nature in its most threatening guise. Her evil gaze conjoins pre-being and post-being; it is the black hole we emerge from and return to in the end. From this perspective, Perseus’s ruse suggests that our traffic with images and imaging has less to do with likeness to life than its arrest and incapacitation.
Following his confrontation with the Gorgon, Perseus brought her severed head to the agora as a gift to Athena, a fatal trophy that she could then employ as a means—one might again say a technology—of domination. Athena proceeded to mount it on her shield. When turned on her enemies, it would stop them in their tracks. More importantly, it is a panoptical power that the goddess gained from the monster, one that is at work whether seen or not. The mere threat of that gaze is enough to subdue every potential opponent.1 We can begin to think here of a kind of preemptive image, operative even when not in view. Hence the enduring agency, admittedly fainter in reproduction, of evil eyes reproduced on martial regalia to this day.
Presently we are perhaps more primed than ever to approach pictures with caution, to see them as masks that can see us in turn. In the light of the latest advances in technical optics, we know now that evil eyes do not just reduce life to a block of stone but harvest its energies to keep the pictures coming, to keep them moving, even as we are sucked down their vanishing points. From there, our efforts to cybernetically steer the course of the world through imagistic reflection—via this mirror equipped with special eyelike features that is the computer screen—turn paradoxical. Bathed in the glow of a virtual reality that evolves, unassisted, so rapidly, we are increasingly immobilized. At the same time, this very condition, which also has to do with rapt attention, even fascination, is actively projected in every direction. Once contracted, it can only be spread. The term “viral,” now so readily applied to the workings of media, speaks directly to the idea of an imagistic contagion. But equally it could prompt us to think about inoculation, or the apotropaic element in our traffic with images. After all, the head of Medusa can be turned around and then worn like a mask; the evil eye can be substituted for one’s own. Roger Caillois, the French wayward surrealist and practitioner of “diagonal science,” puts it accordingly:
Almost everywhere we see in man this tenacious, almost ineradicable, fear of the eye whose gaze paralyzes, roots him to the spot, suddenly deprives him of thought, movement and will. He is afraid of finding himself in front of this circular device, which can bring unconsciousness or death, which can kill or turn to stone. He is terrified by it, but at the same time tries to use this instrument of terror so as to be master of it in his turn. He invents fabulous creatures with the sole object of wringing from them this paralyzing power, against which he feels defenseless, but which he hopes to take and use for his own ends.[2]
The French have a word for it: méduser. As a verb, to medusa means to paralyze or become petrified. Caillois employs this term throughout his 1960 book Méduse et cie (The Mask of Medusa), which traces this hypnotic phenomenon through human as well as natural history. Swiftly passing between zoological studies of mimicking insects and accounts derived from folklore, fables, and legends of our own mimetic assumption of such mimicries, the author provides us with a theory of imaging that pointedly departs from any then-reigning standard in either art or science. At the time, it might have seemed far-fetched; today, less so. “Circular device” and “instrument of terror”: Caillois’s language primes us to think of this eye that disorients and saps its victim of vitality through a technological lens. In his account, it could already be pointing to a future of light sensors and scanners, rendering and modeling programs, the manufacture of all sorts of virtual or augmented realities, holographic projections, visor and glove simulations, tactile telemetry, and so on. Once equipped with large data reserves of memory, it can store every image we have ever made of ourselves, display and transmit these on privately owned public networks, and exploit them in training large language models in service of simulating lifelike appearances of people and their things, and, with the same data, monetize things and even people in ever more forensically targeted marketing campaigns. The commerce of these images and goods might seem to reflect our identities as a mirror image of our affinities. In truth, we should make out in this process a chilling parallel not to the narcissistic affirmation of the mirror but to the neutralizing power of a gaze that subsumes anyone who seeks confirmation in it. Again, the curious mirror under review here is also a mask, and it gives rise to the whole parade of our online avatars, hashtags, and handles. This now is a device that can no longer be limited to the arenas of cultic ritual or theater, of festival or warfare; it extends across all these various contexts and bundles their operations as an all-purpose application. Promising a supernatural extension of its user’s powers, it actually functions in reverse, sapping human vitality and placing it in standing reserve. And it does so ceaselessly: The mirror-mask is an application that cannot be removed.[3]
2.2 The “fabulous creatures” of Caillois come in varied forms: godly, biological, and machinic. In our attempt to think the algorithm—that is, precisely not to explain it—we have decided to conflate them. The explanations are plentiful and often banal. A guiding principle of this project is to step back from the breaking news in order to face a time when what we are witnessing now was envisioned as a distant point on the horizon of possibility. The sense of wonder that still pervades even the most contemporary accounts of the algorithm support the perception that it belongs to that class of things which are superhuman, at once deific and grotesque. The zoological and mythographic tendencies of Caillois are by no means out of place here. And neither are those of Ernst Jünger, another philosophically inclined naturalist, whose experience as a soldier on the fronts of World War I gained him a lucid vantage on the technocratic transformations of humanity at an incipient stage that feeds directly into our own. The turn from subjective being to objective matériel is described by Jünger on the battlefields that defined the tenor of the twentieth century, right from its outset, as one alternating between “total mobilization” and deathly arrest. In a particularly astute essay from 1934 titled “On Pain,” he declares, “Today we can say with some certainty that the world of the self-gratifying and self-critical individual is over and that its system of values, if no doubt still widespread, has been overthrown in all decisive points or refuted by its very own consequences.”[4] And here the myth of Medusa crops up again, now linked to an excursus on photography:
The photograph stands outside of the zone of sensitivity. It has a telescopic quality; one can tell that the event photographed is seen by an insensitive and invulnerable eye. It records the bullet in mid-flight just as easily as it captures a man at the moment an explosion tears him apart. . . . Photography, then, is an expression of our peculiarly cruel way of seeing. Ultimately, it is a kind of evil eye, a type of magical possession.[5]
A new, hyper-extended form of perception had emerged in the technological channeling of visuality, one amputated from the organs of sight, and therefore quasi-autonomous. This insensate gaze is one that cannot be returned, as Jacques Lacan observed of the camera pointed at him during his performative lecture Télévision, recorded in 1973 and broadcast on prime-time TV in France. Fixed to the spot by a machine eye, his unease is palpable, but so too is a kind of giddy enthusiasm at “making TV” and becoming a television personality—albeit of an unlikely type.[6] His critically minded misuse of the medium, as well as his hyper-theatrical mode of declamation, amounts to a final salvo in the struggle against the drain of affect brought about by the lens. The automation of imaging that begins with the camera as “the pencil of nature” and then is put through all its mechanical, electric, and finally electronic paces, corresponds, step by step, with the progressive anesthetization of its beholder. The image, too, has only become more “invulnerable” and “telescopic” over the years, largely thanks to the technologies developed by the military-industrial sector over the course of two rounds of global war. This is to say that precision-tooled pictures were gradually extracted from their sensitive material substrates, the paper to which silver gelatin once adhered and on which its crystals were burned. Such shifts in material culture carry an emotional cost. The transition could be described this simply: Sensation has given way to cold information.
1.3 Today, images would seem to matter less for their iconographic contents than their operational processes of information gathering and transmission. Underwritten by the algorithm, every digital image consorts with another, potentially every other. It reaches deep into a well of past instances—a “long tale” which itself continues to grow at an ever-accelerating rate—and from this burgeoning database produces new instances of itself. Astounding and anomalous images flare up on our screens in paradoxical answer to cybernetic metrics of probability. These are simulations in the strict sense of the word: copies without originals. They take shape from a gray fog of data dust, a point cloud in which every grain is movable and measurable like Jünger’s “bullet in mid-flight,” yielding velocity vectors and vapor trails. Computer-generated imaging (CGI) arises from the alignment and realignment of floating points. Such techniques are novel, to be sure, yet they draw back to the ancient astrological realm we began with. From an infinite number of stars, we chose to connect only those with pictorial—and, moreover, mythic—potential. Today, we are once more prepared “to read what was never written,” as Walter Benjamin so aptly described our earliest attempts to map the cosmos.[7] In fact, this is what we do all the time as we peer at the screens of our laptops and phones.
The algorithmically code-scripted image produces itself from out of itself—one might call this a kind of autopoiesis. If so, it is one without the slightest organic grounding. Really, this image is but a phantasm, or, to employ a term that has dominated so much of the current discourse around artificial intelligence, a hallucination. It is a fleeting effect, something produced from something else (code) en route to producing something else (reality). Look deeper into the black box: It is like the night sky, where points of light flicker with mysterious purpose against an utterly indifferent and meaningless void. On keyboards and touchscreens, our fingers trace the pathways between them. At every moment in our traffic with images, it would seem, we are reaching into darkness. And what is perhaps most frightening, in those despondent moments that inevitably follow the exhilarating rush, is the realization that this enveloping abyss retains the imprint of our actions. It is through the negative space between imagistic particles, where nothingness thickens into a kind of memory foam, that we commune, however unwittingly, with the command-and-control center of all artificial life. Effectively, the image has become an interface between one form of being and another. As much as it surrenders to our most fanciful designs, it captures our touch. This is how it “sees” us.
The algorithm is a searching equation. It is inextricably linked to our engines of search, which have steadily gained in independent volition under its sway. Able to itemize and cross-reference virtually every search ever attempted, it has become immeasurably powerful in recent years. It can not only conjure, at nearly the speed of light, what we most want to see, but also race ahead of it to show whatever comes next. At the extreme, such acceleration in imaging can only become entangled with inertia. We sense it already: the stiffness that lurks beneath the promise of endless mutability, the thrill of the morph.[8] The beguiling interface of the image screen is a mask through which we might once more make out the dark eye of the Gorgon. The CEOs of the big tech company Nvidia certainly did so in branding their outfit with a logo reminiscent of CBS’s all-seeing orb, but now spiraling and colored green—a leafy hue that proclaims a commitment to environmental sustainability, however questionable it might be in this case. That said, this logo also invites a more ominous reading. The company name was initially limited to the acronym NV, standing for “next version,” which later was expanded to recall the Latin term for envy, invidia, also often associated with a hostile and destructive gaze. In Roman art, invidia is sometimes depicted as a gaunt Medusa-like figure with serpents for hair. Now she haunts the realm of microchips, gaming consoles, and self-driving cars.
1.4 In the “Convolute J” of Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project) is included this quote from Gottfried Keller: “Was like a Medusa-shield / image of petrified unrest.”[9] What better way to characterize this implement that conjoins mirror and armor, defense and aggression, recall and prognostication? Susan Buck-Morss has suggested that Keller’s words closely resonated with Benjamin’s idiosyncratic program of media analysis, the entirety of which can be placed under the banner of “dialectics at a standstill.”[10] Let’s take our bearings from there, where the dreadful thought of “petrified unrest” becomes a dialectical figure and discursive spur. In other words, let’s side with neither the technological boosters nor those who wring their hands over “the fate of man.” And let’s avoid futuristic bravura as well as nostalgic regret. In writing this text, we have chosen to follow the spiraling course of the algorithm itself, backward and forward in time. Our subject incites an interpretative delirium. And this is by no means quelled when we turn to its numerical, computational side—the topic of our next installment.
NOTES:
[1] “The Gorgon’s head is nothing more than a mask. It is not irrelevant to see in its intervention the belief in the evil eye, the hypnotizing power of ocelli [among insects], clearly related to the wearing of masks in primitive communities, where often even the chance sight of a ceremonial mask by the non-initiate is a sacrilege bringing death, or at least the partial paralysis or the consumption of the bold or unfortunate person. And those in power will see to it that these expected results do indeed happen. At times they need to do nothing, the thought alone will be sufficient.” Roger Caillois, The Mask of Medusa, trans. George Ordish (Clarkson N. Potter Inc., 1964), 99.
[2] Caillois, 101–2.
[3] These thoughts were partly inspired by the classics scholar Jean-Pierre Vernant, whose writings on the gaze of the Gorgon offer a striking counterpoint to those of Caillois. While both take up its relation to masking, they do so in quite different ways. The expansion of power promised by such a mask—the power of the evil eye, which the wearer “hopes to take and use for his own ends,” as Caillois puts it—can only backfire in Vernant’s account. “The face of Gorgo is a mask, but instead of wearing it to mime the god, this figure reproduces the effect of a mask merely by looking you in the eye. It is as if the mask had parted from your face, had become separated from you, only to be fixed facing you, like your shadow or reflection, without the possibility of your detaching yourself from it. It is your gaze that is captured in the mask. The face of Gorgo is the Other, your double. It is the Strange, responding to your face like an image in the mirror . . . but at the same time, it is an image that is both less and more than yourself. It is a simple reflection and yet also a reality from the world beyond, an image that captures you.” Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Death in the Eyes: Gorgo, Figure of the Other,” Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays, ed. Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton University Press, 1991), 138.
[4] Ernst Jünger, On Pain, trans. David C. Durst (Telos Press Publishing, 2008), 17.
[5] Jünger, 39.
[6] Lacan begins his televised talk by relating it to those delivered in the lecture halls of academia. In both instances, he notes the presence of a gaze that cannot be addressed but on behalf of which he speaks: “Dans les deux cas, il s’agit d’un regard à qui je ne m’adresse dans aucun des deux cas, mais au nom de quoi—ce regard—au nom de quoi je parle.” Such speech is “cantonade,” as he puts it—speech directed at no one in particular. Yet one must assume Lacan was aware of the fact that, assembled before the TV screen, the ranks of his audience would have grown to include potentially everyone. It is one thing to be unable to meet the gaze of the collective when operating within the psychic space of public speaking, of teaching. It is another thing entirely to operate in the space of mass mediation, as an entertainer. See: Jacques Lacan, Télévision: youtube.com/watch?v=EF-SElmdOY4
[7] “‘To read what was never written.’ Such reading is the most ancient, reading prior to all languages, from entrails, the stars, or dances.” Walter Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty,” Selected Writings: Volume 3, 1935–1938, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Belknap Press, 2002), 722.
[8] Regarding the expanding scope of the paralytic onslaught, this too was predicted in the ancient myth. It is told that, following decapitation, Medusa’s head fell into the sea, turning everything in this liquid realm—figure of ceaseless flux and circulation par excellence—to stone. It was perhaps this incident that alerted Perseus to the unlimited power of her eye, which continues to work even after she dies. Ovid’s description of this scene sounds a curiously timely note: “The fresh plants, still living inside, and absorbent, respond to the influence of the Gorgon’s head, and harden at its touch, acquiring a new rigidity in branches and fronds. And the ocean nymphs try out this wonder on more plants, and are delighted that the same thing happens at its touch, and repeat it by scattering the seeds from the plants through the waves. Even now corals have the same nature, hardening at a touch of air, and what was alive, under the water, above water is turned to stone.” Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Anthony S. Kline, University of Virginia Electronic Texts Center, ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/Metamorph13.htm.
[9] Gottfried Keller, quoted in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Belknap Press, 1999), 319.
[10] Benjamin’s project is here described as an attempt to treat myth allegorically, or to consider it as a kind of archaeological ruin within which whole epochs of human consciousness have congealed into discontinuous strata. See: Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (MIT Press, 1991), 196–201.Jan Tumlir and Jeffrey Stuker have collaborated on numerous projects over the years. Together, they ran a series of public seminars on the topic of mimicry, which were held in various locations around Los Angeles, including the Public School (2019), Gattopardo (2022), the Fulcrum Press (2023), and Ehrlich Steinberg (2024). Many of their thoughts on the matter were collected in the third issue of the London-based journal Effects, which they coedited. Included in this publication is their “ABC of Mimicry,” a three-letter glossary, which features an entry on the historical, metaphorical, and etymological origins of the word algorithm near its start. The following article expands upon its principal concerns. Three more entries will be published here in swift succession over these summer months.