ARTIST STATEMENT
Captured by an Algorithm is a commemorative plate series that looks at romance novels through the lens of the Amazon Kindle Popular Highlight algorithm. A passage in a Kindle e-book becomes a Popular Highlight after a certain number of people independently highlight the same passage. Popular Highlights show up as underlined text along with the number of people who highlighted that passage. These highlighted passages are not the sort of thing that people would broadcast. They aren’t something people are saving to return to later or posting on Goodreads. Not having to perform through a persona allows people to express their empathy and vulnerability. Since 2010, I have collected Kindle Popular Highlights from romance novels into a database. Each commemorative plate features one of these highlights and a landscape generated by running Photoshop’s Photomerge algorithm on scanned romance novel covers.
Over one hundred thousand individual acts of highlighting were used to determine the content for this work telling the story of the intense loneliness, grief, vulnerability, and discontent felt by the readers. This work reveals a glimpse of a positive, anonymous social network emerging unintentionally through this minor Kindle feature. With this ongoing project I draw attention to this existing example of collective social support in order to change society’s vision for the future of social technologies.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Sophia Brueckner is an artist and engineer who researches how technology shapes us. As a software engineer at Google, she designed and built products used by tens of millions. At the Rhode Island School of Design and the MIT Media Lab, she researched the simultaneously empowering and controlling aspects of technology with a focus on tangible and social interfaces. Since 2011, Brueckner has taught Sci-Fi Prototyping, an internationally renowned course combining science fiction, extrapolative thinking, building prototypes, and technology ethics at MIT, Harvard, RISD, Brown, and the University of Michigan. Brueckner prototypes alternatives to the tech industry’s limited visions for how we live with technology. She makes both physical and digital artifacts combining code, digital fabrication, and electronics with traditional media. Brueckner’s work has been featured by Artforum, SIGGRAPH, NPR, The Atlantic, Portugal’s National Museum of Contemporary Art, Leonardo, ISEA, Eyeo, and more. She was an artist-in-residence at Autodesk Pier 9 and Nokia Bell Labs E.A.T. She is currently an associate professor at the Stamps School of Art and Design and directs the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing (ESC) at the University of Michigan. Her ongoing objective is to combine her background in design and engineering with the perspective of an artist to inspire a more positive future.
© Sophia Brueckner