Excerpt from Algorithmic Logic Away from Home: Variability and Fugitivity by Mitch McEwen in Material Variance, Edited by Lola Ben-Alon, Columbia Books on Architecture and the City
In the roughly 2,000 years between Euclid’s Elements and Rene Descartes’ La Geometrie, the procedural techniques that made space measurable and meaningful intensified in Baghdad at the House of Wisdom. Al-Khwarizmi, mathematician, and astronomer whose major works introduced Hindu-Arabic numerals and the concepts of algebra (into European mathematics), circa the 9th century, corrected broken maps of an ante-world, a world that could be thought from the potential reach of the prophet Mohhamed and only provisionally as a place to be traversed. Al-K̲h̲wārazmī’s charts and numerical lists included more than 2,400 cities, coded into latitude and longitude.
Descartes’ Geometry displaces these place protocols– this Indian Ocean measurement of the world– to create a model of a universal method, relying on a non-muslim God. If geometry emerges in Descartes as an Enlightenment project it is so as yet another transcription of the algorithm. Displaced from the questions of place, navigation, astronomy, and poetics that the algorithm initiated as methods of al-K̲h̲wārazmī.
I want to relate this to additional work happening in the field. Mae-ling Lokko– when she’s talking about the “big four”: sugar, rice, cotton, and wheat– there’s what she called this problem of “scaling up.” That is, when we scale up, we encounter and reproduce the system as we know it. This system is entangled with ‘man’— what Katherine McLittrick talks about as beginning in 1492: when we scale up the system of universalizing as we know it, we’re scaling up this big four of crops, as well. The plantation and whiteness come along with the human and the global.
What I want to share in this chapter, in the context of material variability, is a speculative means of working at the intersection of algorithms and Black culture. That is – if there’s a 700-year history of the algorithm before geometry as we know it, before the 17th-century work of Descartes– that means that there are 700 years of algorithmic work that is not Western. That means a minimum of 7 centuries of algorithms circulating that are not within that rubric of the universal whiteness-producing human. There were 700 years of algorithmic production before the plantation.