Political pawns

London – Inside the Black Box (Supervised Learning) imagines a political system governed by a population of algorithms.

• With the EU Referendum still uppermost in people’s minds, many will have asked: ‘what if everyone had voted?’
• Inside the Black Box challenges the Western world’s technocratic tendencies with its black sci-fi humour

The subject of democracy is at the heart of artist, designer and recent Royal College of Art graduate Tom Pearson’s project, which imagines a political system made up of millions of proxy algorithms, each unique to every citizen.

The piece, comprising a film and accompanying props, is a critique of society’s obsession with algorithms and how they are used to gauge our identity so that they might predict our future behaviour. This is satirised in Pearson’s film in a dystopian research lab in which his digital avatar George undergoes training to make him vote the right way in a forthcoming referendum.

‘The black box is a device with parallels to the increasing complexity of political institutions and the public’s understanding of the workings of government,’ explains Pearson.