Regulated Interpellation
Adna Muslija
The All-Aligned project by Uroš Krčadinac was thought through and implemented transdisciplinary. The author skilfully passes the project's backbones – (micro)identities and flags – through “filters” of contemporary art, political theory, sociology, critical philosophy, mathematics, engineering, and artificial intelligence, so that in the end, like the finest desert sand, they are sifted through silkscreen of love, and peace. Thus, All-Aligned, conceived in a transdisciplinary game, is born to empower us to think collectively and critically about our (digital-political) reality and to feel ourselves and our society humanely.
However, the question arises: how do All-Aligned achieve their goal? Mediating and provoking critical reflection is challenging. It is even more challenging if one adds the epithet of the collective to it. Precisely because of that, this project's participative and open nature has a specific value that seeks consideration. Namely, AI software for generating non-existent flags and flags generated/designed by the project's participants constitute the form of this project. Its conceptual basis, on the other hand, consists of people who, creating visual representations of their identity, participate in what could be called regulated interpellation.
Considering the meaning that Louis Althusser adds to the term interpellation – as a process through which ideologies constitute their subjects “drawing them into their discourse”, it could be said that Krčadinac creates algorithm-mediated conditions for subject production. By asking a straightforward question: “What does your flag look like? Just yours. If you were a country, a small country, and you had a flag, your own flag, what would that flag look like for you as a person?” participants are invited to generate their flags. In such a process, these same participants are drawn into the process of raising awareness of ideologies, rather than the ideology itself, which is why the interpellation itself can be characterized as controlled and regulated.
As the process of raising awareness of ideologies, through confronting the artificially (co)created entropy of representations and identities, takes place in public space – galleries and via the Internet – conditions for encouraging critical reflection of (digital-political) reality on both an individual and collective level are established. However, the outcome of such awareness is not the creation of animosity between the presented identities and ideological beliefs! On the contrary, by emphasizing the infinite number of identities that can be generated, their microscopic character is brought into focus, as well as the irrelevance of the conflicts that could arise from them.
Observing the image of the world, rather than his surrounding world, and analyzing civilization rather than a society, Krčadinac symbolically decomposes both into fractals. With our I's, beliefs, and labels, we humans are nowadays essentially products of automated mechanisms of ideology – algorithmically generated fractals.
Although in everyday language, the algorithm is obscurely being reduced to software algorithms that the free market has made one of the most robust tools of its reproduction; the term implies any process determined by a series of rules, input data/values, and a particular result.
Let us go back to Althusser and his thesis that through a series of apparatuses such as school, police, administration, and culture, man is “drawn” into ideology and becomes a subject by accepting its value system. Is not then the process of interpellation an algorithm in itself?
Therefore, Krčadinac establishes the conditions for the controlled awareness of ideologies and their derivatives – identities and makes it possible to understand the algorithmic character of reality as such, in which computer algorithms become only one of the ideological apparatuses of the digital capitalist episteme. However, the result of participation in the process of generating personal non-existent flags through AI software is not simply playing with engineering structures. Software All-Aligned prefers to teach us that artificial intelligence and algorithms, as they are, are no precedent for the dystopia that awaits us. First of all, our living and everyday life are already woven from different forms of algorithms. Second, science's progress is neither possible nor should it be sabotaged or stopped. We will experience dystopia only when we, as objects, surrender to software and ideological algorithms, falsely convinced that we are authentic subjects of an infinitely fragmented collective.
The level of awareness of the ideological and algorithmic background is finally followed by the understanding of what makes us subjects – the power to feel(for), which transforms the inevitable fractality of society into a non-destructive fact of civilization. Marking solidarity and empathy as supreme social values is the final result of participation in this project.
It is clear then why it is unnecessary to emphasize the purposefulness of the All-Aligned project in the context of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The fractality and fragmentation of this society, as well as others that arose from the dissolution of the SFRY, are not and should not be the final product of the algorithms of political, national, ethnic, and any other identity division. It is precisely why this exhibition, with its exceptional visual saturation, AI software, and participation methodology, in addition to regulated interpellation, in Manifesto Gallery creates conditions for the establishment of a meta-algorithm – a cultural algorithm into which the audience is “entered,” and from which “subjects of small cultural revolution” are extracted.
The essay Regulated Interpellation by curator and artist Adna Muslija has been published in the catalogue of The All-Aligned Exhibition in the Manifesto Gallery of Contemporary Arts in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina.