GhostWriter, about the about – Track #7

GhostWriter is the name of the work we will exhibit in Düsseldorf. Here is the short description we have given Marco and Filippo for the exhibition labels and communication materials:

“To draw a line you need a pen, to hold a pen you need a hand, but what is behind the hand is a debatable matter."
Italo Calvino

“What is an autobiography? Who are its authors? What happens when the 'others' and non-human, algorithmic subjects come into play, increasing the complexity of our interactions and influencing the process of construction/perception of the self?

GhostWriter explores the new boundaries of autobiography in the hyperconnected era describing a new literary genre: the Algoritmic Autobiography. By recording digital traces we leave behind in our daily lives, GhostWriter searches for patterns and uses them to create life stories in the form of new types of publications.

It is a reflection on the changing of identity and the role of data, information and algorithms.”

Many elements of this brief text have spread from the virtual pages of the blog to the physical exhibition. Italo Calvino’s beautiful quote has become the opening sentence of the project. The questions we had at the beginning have remained the same and continue to determine the field of the work. Once again, we come across the term “algorithmic autobiography”, the idea of “capturing”/“recording” and the search for “patterns” (in the case of Stakhanov). We should also mention the concept of “life story” derived from the Self Memory System and the ghostwriter character ̶ a key part of Erica Scourti’s work “The Outage” ̶ which serves as title.

Nevertheless, there are two unknown and crucial elements which appear for the first time in the description: the reference to “a new literary genre” and “new types of publications”.

In Track #3, we defined the processual nature of the self and of writing: rather than being “authors” we are “curators” of our autobiographies, continuously choosing (selecting) fragments of our lives, experiences, our own memories and those of others ̶ within constant feedback between the self and the culture and environment (relationships) we are part of.

In Track #5, Stakhanov’s cosmology opened up to us the heavens of the “Res Algoritmica”, in which the digital representations created by non-human entities such as Stacks create our “Imago” ̶ profiles which are almost inaccessible to us and which consciously and unconsciously influence our self and our relationships.

If, as we have previously written many times, “we are never alone when writing our autobiography”, it is also true that the introduction of software and algorithms gives rise to a new form of non-human author. Indeed, something/someone is already “writing” and “un-writing” pieces and fragments of our digital self, thereby influencing and interfering with processes for the construction of the self and our relationships with the environment.

GhostWriter embodies this new type of author, who observes the digital traces we leave behind us, interprets them using the Self Memory System model to collect them and extract the patterns of a story, and finally hands them back to us in a hierarchic structure and in the form of proper publications.

Books. New types of books.

Just like the classic ghostwriter, this non-human author remains hidden and does not have a name. The book the ghostwriter will write will bear our name and in this sense will continue to playfully preserve the ambiguity of autobiography as we have learned to understand this term. It will reveal the obscurity of algorithms and the new mechanisms of a technologically-mediated self, thereby creating the necessary conditions for the existence of the new literary genre we have announced.

This is where the two ends of the circle meet, leading us to the Algorithmic Autobiography, in the concreteness of the (new) cultural artefact which we can manipulate, criticise and understand.