Sara Milkes Espinosa

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  Broken Algorithm is an interactive performative game-experiment that engages participants in a critical exploration of an “algorithm,”  and its implications in social behavior. For this iteration, the context was Facebook and my stalking of Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook profile. In a room full of puzzles, prompts and games, a  group of participants is given a set of instructions , an “algorithm”.  They have to complete it progressively by navigating through a coded system of visual prompts, interacting with objects of research or games, and answering questions about them on a form.

  The instructions are progressively more complex, and the system is designed to break apart and lead to a chaotic stage where actors deflect from subjects of an instruction to actors in a game with confusing rules.

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  Aside from the instructions and the polls. Participants are given tokens from the Token Test, a test devised in 1967 to identify learning disabilities, but the tokens become currencies for interactions and formation of groups in the Broken Algorithm space. The performance culminates as a reflection on the mythologies of algorithms and the passage from closed functional systems to clusters of dysfunctional processes where people make decisions.