From the hammer to the algorithm. Technical elements, individuals and ensembles in the 21st century

PABLO ESTEBAN RODRÍGUEZ

Londres

Workshop; The Open Machine; 2019

University College of London

In On The Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Gilbert Simondon made the distinction between technical elements, individuals and ensembles to explain the transformations in modern technology from the Industrial Revolution to the emergence of cybernetics. In Individuation in the Light of the Notions of Form and Information, he defined the domains of the pre-individual, the individual and the transindividual to analyze the processes of individuation. Our aim is to combine both triads to study how algorithms and platforms signal a new stage in the 21st century in which data constitute the basis of a complex technical activity that has profound political and economic consequences thanks to the successive complexities of the processes: from self-regulation to automation and from there to self-organisation, on the basis of a critical study of the notion of information.