Matteo Pasquinelli: Anomaly Detection

Algorithmic vision is about the understanding of vast amount of data according to a specific vector: it may be about common patterns of behavior in social media, suspicious keywords in surveillance networks, buying and selling tendencies in stock markets or the oscillation of temperature in a specific region of the planet. The eye of the algorithm blindly records emerging properties and forecasts tendencies out of large data set. Such procedures of computation are pretty repetitive and robotic and they generally operate along two main functions: pattern recognition and anomaly detection. The two epistemic poles of pattern and anomaly are the two sides of the same coin of algorithmic governance. An unexpected anomaly can be detected only against the ground of a pattern regularity. And conversely a pattern emerges only through the median equalization of different tendencies. Here mathematics starts to resound immediately as a new epistemology of power.

Matteo Pasquinelli (MA, Bologna; PhD, London) is a philosopher. He wrote the book Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons (2008) and edited the anthologies Gli algoritmi del capitale (2014) and Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and its Traumas (forthcoming for Meson Press) among others. He lectures frequently at the intersection of political philosophy, media theory and cognitive sciences in universities and art institutions. His texts have been translated in many languages and he has contributed to academic and non-academic journals and newspapers such as Springerin, Multitudes, Parrhesia, Fibreculture, Theory Culture & Society, Leonardo, Lugar Comum, Rethinking Marxism, e-flux, Open!, DIS magazine, Libération, Il manifesto, Der Freitag. Together with Wietske Maas he wrote the Manifesto of Urban Cannibalism. In 2014 at NGBK Berlin he co-curated the exhibition The Ultimate Capital is the Sun and the symposium The Metabolism of the Social Brain.