Artist statement

“New York City is being optimised to run like a motherboard… It’s being smoothed out into the performance characteristics of a microchip, and you — all of you — are just loitering; because whatever it is you’re doing in that valuable space couldn’t possibly be as valuable as what a computer can do in that same office space.” — Kevin Slavin

Kevin Slavin’s celebrated talk at the 2011 Geneva Lift conference Those Algorithms Which Govern Our Lives was the main inspiration for Algorithmic Architecture. Slavin questions the implications of a world in which what we watch, eat and drink are increasingly determined by software algorithms.

Algorithms are also performing the majority of stock market trading in global financial institutions. They are more efficient (and therefore way more profitable) if they operate close to central internet hubs such as the Carrier Hotel in New York or Silicon Roundabout in London. Buildings near such hubs are rapidly being bought up by financial institutions and reinforced to house vast servers that are far heavier than the people who used to work in them.

Like domestic software, these algorithms are not infallible — they occasionally make catastrophic mistakes such as the glitch which instigated the 2010 Wall Street flash crash.

As a visual metaphor for these observations, Behrens deliberately exposes the cracks in Google Earth's 3D rendering technology as he navigates it through several cities with algorithmically determined stock markets. The ominous morphing of streets and buildings into eerie perspective distortions corroborates Slavin's suggestions that the algorithms now running our cities are not concerned with humanity in any form...