Black Box White Magic

Ever since technology started developing outside of a predictable, controlled environment, both the positivist progressive utopian vision and the fear of its outgrowing humans became a subconscious ghost that stayed ever since, with every new invention.

This talk focuses on the the principals of magical thinking in technology through the languages and design paradigms that construct them. What are the integral elements that help build the myth of technology as a promising compensation machine (Kluitenberg, 2005), making amends for human deficiencies and at the same time offering fertile ground for imaginative paranoia and conspiracy theories?

By opening the black box we open a series of questions regarding the conceptualization of technology: the question of its inherent and absolute functionality, the process of obscuring it’s internal working, and the effects of this process.