the body and the archive (working title)

This ongoing series is a collaboration with Beatrice Signorello. It  takes as its starting point the concept of homophily:
the presumption that similarity breeds connection, the tendency of people to associate
with others similar to themselves.

This principle underlies many social structures, especially algorithmic recommendation systems,
often resulting in ideological isolation and segregation.

Our research first led us to Allan Sekula’s The Body and the Archive, which focuses on the historical practice of measuring and archival cataloguing of the human body.
Today’s algorithmic systems similarly rely on extraction, labeling, and classification of data,
“structures informed not by the narrative paradigm, but by the paradigm of the archive.”