As the already saturated internet continues to be flooded by new content, how can we hope to continue being able to navigate it? ‘The Algorithmic Pedestal’ a new exhibition at J/M Gallery in London, tries to address this problem by considering how algorithms have been entrusted with a role  not unlike that of art curators, filtering the deluge of digital ephemera to determine what we actually see. But, the exhibition asks, who really benefits from ‘algorithmic curation’?

The show is the culmination of doctoral research by Laura Herman, from the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute. Herman recognises that social media has long been an invaluable and accessible tool for artists – especially those not represented in museums or galleries – to build their public presence. For some time, creatives of all kinds have been able to amass large followings on blogging sites such as Instagram and Tumblr by providing a steady scroll of images, together representing an idiosyncratic creative vision. However, more recently, in a move led by TikTok and imitated by other platforms, each user’s feed has become a unique, hyper-niche offering dictated by the preferences inferred from past actions – skips, likes, comments and shares – all calculated by a mysterious ‘black box’ algorithm.

Even if I choose to follow a curator whose expertise I trust on social media, I am highly unlikely to see everything they post, since certain kinds of content are suppressed by the algorithm. Inevitably, this has forced creators to adapt their practice according to the algorithm’s elusive, ever-changing needs if they have any hope of reaching a wide audience. An artwork has a better chance of being promoted if it has more faces and less nudity, for example, with the latter banned on many platforms.

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