Susanne Huth. Analog Algorithm - Lübbke-Tidow, Maren

In her new book, Analog Algorithm - Landscapes of Machine Learning, Susanne Huth refers to the New Topographics movement, which represented an artistic yet critical view of society and man-made landscape in the Western United States. While in the 1970s it was mainly about industrialization, such as highways, shopping malls, industrial parks, motels, housing estates, and airports, Huth shows contemporary society and social conditions in communities, corporate headquarters, and research facilities on the edge of the digital borderland. The artist explored the spatial reality of a digital ideology on the American West Coast. The photographs in this book were taken between 2016 and 2019 in Silicon Valley, San Francisco and the Bay Area. As an analogy to the photographs of the new cultural landscapes, the book contains illustrations that examine the digital architectures of the Silicon Valley companies. Some, such as the interfaces of social media platforms, are immediately recognizable by their structure and their design elements, others are more abstract.