It begins with a question: can human beings move together as an algorithm? For decades, Random International have been breeding digital flocks, exploring the behaviour of objects by programming the individual to move as one. What if, purely through following the instruction to move together, many people could make a collective lifeform? This would be code embodied in human intelligence and action. ‘Technology’ is absent from this performance; the human computes. But the machine imagines.

Working with Artificial Intelligence to size up and depict our hypothesised performance, Random International researches how a swarm translates into human form, prompting Human Algorithm into a synthetic visual existence. The algorithm imagines what it looks like for human beings to perform an algorithm. This is where the trajectory of Human Algorithm bifurcates into the imagined and the physical performance. The generated images inform the path for the latter’s development, but now the performance already exists in its own blurred world. The images become documents of this shared reality and its ambiguous terrain.