Absolutist Algo drives inquiry and draws focus on the issues of technology regulation, and the lack thereof in the United States legal system by presenting a hybrid of quantitative and qualitative content in the form of an interactive visual archive presented on the web. In a bid to raise social consciousness of algorithmic processes and their impact on public life and society, Absolutist Algo exists as a poetic visualization that confronts not only the data presented but inquires why the corpus of information that exists is limited considering the extensive scope of algorithmic presence in our everyday lives.

The work accesses a corpus of 1,418 case law documents that include the keyword ‘algorithm’ derived from the Case Law Access Project API created by Harvard Law School. Embedded over the quantitative visualization, the Algorithm, represented as a cellular structure floats across the canvas. The anthropomorphic image exists as a metaphor of the Algorithm as a legal entity, autonomous and absolute from its private creators in its ability to independently impact the public sphere, a space for political action. Upon clicking the Algorithm, it acts as a portal to a critical essay that can be found in the Publication. The essay reflects on the unprecedented leverage held by algorithmic processes in our modern systems. It notes the need to reassess society’s relationship to them in a legal context when reflecting on its wider impacts on governance, power, and accessibility within our communities.

The archive was curated and designed by employing machine learning as collaborator. The work uses natural language processing (NLP) models which include TF-IDF, K-means clustering; and UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction for visualization.