Virtual Contingency
Digital Techniques of Remembering and Forgetting : Lecture

Recent developments in the web show a way of managing/ constructing memory and remembrance that is drastically different from familiar forms. The problem has moved from the excess of forgetting to the excess of memory: the web seems to remember everything. These practices can be interpreted in the broader framework of a Web Intelligence that has definitely abandoned the effort to reproduce and simulate the forms of human consciousness and intelligence and relies rather on the users' interpretations to direct its own selections. The lecture presented the concept of "virtual contingency" to indicate the specifically digital way in which the web "feeds" on the uncertainty (contingency) of users in order to orient its own complexity. The lecture was part of the ICI Lecture Series Constituting Wholes II.