Experimentation with a Probable Human-Shaped Object

This chapter sets out the algorithms that will form the focus for this book and their human and non-human associations. The chapter focuses on one particular algorithmic system developed for public transport security and explores the ways in which the system provided a basis for experimenting with what computer scientists termed human-shaped objects. In contrast to much of the social science literature on algorithms that suggests the algorithm itself is more or less fixed or inscrutable, this chapter will instead set out one basis for ethnographically studying the algorithm up-close and in detail. Placing algorithms under scrutiny opens up the opportunity for studying their instability and the ceaseless experimentation to which they are subjected. An important basis for this experimentation, the chapter will suggest, is elegance. The chapter will suggest that elegance opens up a distinct way to conceive of the experimental prospects of algorithms under development and their ways of composing humans.