Counter-modelling darkly: figuration in the age of simulation

Abstract

This article examines the intersection of computational systems and knowledge politics against the backdrop of ‘dark epistemology’ which is a paradigm in which digital technologies subvert the very terms for figuration and truth. Using Sylvia Wynter’s counter-human narrative theory, the author posits that algorithmic media are always mediated, never a raw record, but a site of struggle in which power operates through amplifying uncertainty and derailing hegemonic representation of the ‘human’. The argument places emphasis on the way computer systems, as ‘metaphors for metaphor’ (see Chun, in Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, 2013), reassert and disrupt power figurations, facilitating the dissemination of counterfiguration as countering practice. In following the trajectory of a range of examples from satellite imagery to electronic astroturfing, the article locates ‘modelling darkly’ as practice that takes advantage of epistemic turbulence to create discursive space for absent or disenfranchised views.