The first wave of HOLO Annual contributors—Nicholas Whittaker, Thomas Brett, Elvia Wilk, and Huw Lemmey—swiftly gathered around the “ways of partial knowing.” As these pieces started to roll in, Peli Grietzer and I needed to light a new fire in another clime for more contributors to gather around. Maybe it is endemic to technological debates that we are drawn into intense binaristic divides. But I started to look across to the other side of the art-technological range, across from the ‘ways of partial knowing’ that seem to offer looseness, a space to breathe. Claims to full knowing, full ownership, or full seeing seem, rightly, harder to sustain these days. I’d written the partial knowing prompt in response to the suffocating grip of algorithmic prediction that I spend my days tracking and analyzing, to see how others articulate senses of the impossibility of perfect prediction, of human activity or thought.

But of course, there are many ways that prediction has always been part of our cultural heritage, and societies find scientific ways to sort, predict, and distribute resources based on biased predictive thought. I’ve a soft spot for critical discussion of predictive systems of control and the artists and theorists who analyze them. I’ve looked to thinkers like Simone Browne and Cathy O’Neill and Safiya Noble and artists like Zach Blas and American Artist, most frequently, for their insights on histories of predictive policing, predictive capture, and the deployment of surveillance in service of capture. I was particularly taken by 3x3x6, the Taiwan Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, created by Shu Lea Cheang, director, media and net art pioneer, and theorist Paul Preciado. (Francesco Tenaglia’s precise interview with both artists in Mousse is a must-read).

In the space, the Palazzo delle Prigioni, the two investigated the history of the building as a prison, and the exceptional prisoners whose racial or sexual or gender nonconformity led to incarceration: Foucault, the Marquis de Sade, Giaconomo Casanova, and a host of trans and queer thinkers throughout history. The work looks at historical regimes and political definitions of sexual and racial conformity, and the methods of tracking and delineating correct and moral bodies over time: the ways myths of prediction have unfolded in different ways throughout history.

I used these photos and this interview as inspiration this last pandemic year, which I largely spent struggling to complete an essay on internalizing the logic of capture for an issue of Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory (with an incredible list of contributions). In their introduction, Marisa Williamson and Kim Bobier, guest-editors, outline the theme Race, Vision, and Surveillance: “As Simone Browne has observed, performances of racializing surveillance ‘reify boundaries, borders, and bodies along racial lines.’ Taking cues from thinkers such as Browne and Donna Haraway, this special issue draws on feminist understandings of sight as a partial, situated, and embodied type of sense-making laden with ableist assumptions to explore how racial politics have structured practices of oversight. How have technologies of race and vision worked together to monitor modes of being-in-the-world? In what ways have bodies performed for and against such governance?”

Jackie Wang wrote the seminal book Carceral Capitalism (2018), a searing book on the racial, economic, political, legal, and technological dimensions of the U.S. carceral state. A chapter titled “This is a Story about Nerds and Cops” is widely circulated and found on syllabi. I met Jackie in 2013 as we were both living in Boston, where she was completing her dissertation at Harvard. She gave a reading in a black leather jacket at EMW Bookstore, a hub for Asian American and diasporic poets, writers, activists. I’ve followed her writing and thinking closely since. Wang is a beloved scholar, abolitionist, poet, multimedia artist, and Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. In addition to her scholarship, her creative work includes the poetry collection The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void (2021) and the forthcoming experimental essay collection Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun.

Mimi Ọnụọha and I met at Eyebeam as research residents in 2016, and our desks were close to one another. One thing I learned about Mimi is that she is phenomenally busy and in high demand. She is an artist, an engineer, a scholar, and a professor. She created the concept and phrase “algorithmic violence.” At the time she was developing research around power dynamics within archives (you should look up her extended artwork, The Library of Missing Datasets, examining power mediated through what is left out of government or state archives).

Ọnụọha, who lives and works in Brooklyn, is a Nigerian-American artist creating work about a world made to fit the form of data. By foregrounding absence and removal, her multimedia practice uses print, code, installation and video to make sense of the power dynamics that result in disenfranchised communities’ different relationships to systems that are digital, cultural, historical, and ecological. Her recent work includes In Absentia, a series of prints that borrow language from research that black sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois conducted in the nineteenth century to address the difficulties he faced and the pitfalls he fell into, and A People’s Guide To AI, a comprehensive beginner’s guide to understanding AI and other data-driven systems, co-created with Diana Nucera.

If you’ve had any contact with videogames or the games industry in the last 15 years, Leigh Alexander needs no introduction. You’ve either played her work or read her stories or watched her Lo-Fi Let’s Plays on YouTube or read her withering and incisive criticism in one of many marquee venues. She is well-known as a speaker, as a writer and narrative designer focused on storytelling systems, digital society and the future. Along with other women writing critically about games, including Jenn Frank, Lana Polansky, and Cara Ellison, I’ve been reading and influenced by her fiction and criticism since 2008.

Alexander won the 2019 award for Best Writing in a Video Game from the esteemed Writers Guild of Great Britain for Reigns: Her Majesty, and her speculative fiction has been published in Slate and The Verge. Her work often draws her ten years as a journalist and critic on games and virtual worlds, and she frequently speaks on narrative design, procedural storytelling, online culture and arts in technology. She is currently designing games about relationships and working as a narrative design consultant for development teams.

Suzanne Treister, our final contributor to this chapter, has been a pioneer in the field of new media since the late 1980s, and works simultaneously across video, the internet, interactive technologies, photography, drawing and watercolour. In 1988 she was making work about video games, in 1992 virtual reality, in 1993 imaginary software and in 1995 she made her first web project and invented a time travelling avatar, Rosalind Brodsky, the subject of an interactive CD-ROM. Often spanning several years, her projects comprise fantastic reinterpretations of given taxonomies and histories, engaging with eccentric narratives and unconventional bodies of research. Recent projects include The Escapist Black Hole Spacetime, Technoshamanic Systems, and Kabbalistic Futurism.

Treister’s work has been included in the 7th Athens Biennale, 16th Istanbul Biennial, 9th Liverpool Biennial, 10th Shanghai Biennale, 8th Montréal Biennale and 13th Biennale of Sydney. Recent solo and group exhibitions have taken place at Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, among others. Her 2019 multi-part Serpentine Gallery Digital Commission comprised an artist’s book and an AR work. She is the recipient of the 2018 Collide International Award, organised by CERN, Geneva, in collaboration with FACT UK. Treister lives and works in London and the French Pyrenees.