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The Master Algorithm is a holographic projection of Qiu Hao, a newsreader who is the human personification of The Master Algorithm, a figure who constantly mutates, grows and disappears into clouds of data that re-materialise as techno-orientalist nightmares and Asian algorithmic utopias and cityscapes. Speaking through computer generated voices, ‘The Master Algorithm’ takes on different personas to narrate different stories, reciting a chronological sci-fi history of the fourth industrial revolution in China. Each Chinese techno-utopia is narrated through vignettes moving backwards in time, linking each scenario with the possibilities already embedded in the present. The work is titled after computer scientist Pedro Domingos’ book The Master Algorithm (2015), understood to be on Chinese President Xi Jinping’s bookshelf. The book describes machine learning and the possibilities for AI to drive the next evolutionary leap in humanity when a ‘master algorithm’ is discovered that unites neuroscience, evolution, physics, statistics and computer science. Its central hypothesis is that “all knowledge-past, present, and future-can be derived from data by a single, universal learning algorithm”.