Algorithmic artworks make systems of information perceptible. Code crystallizes into images, but code is itself produced by humans in historical circumstances. Only a few contemporary Arab media artists make the algorithmic structure of their media the subject of their art. I attribute this to an ingrained skepticism about top-down structures, systems, surveillance, control. Those Arab artists who do examine algorithmic structures emphasize the delicacy of computer and other networks and their reliance on human agents to build and maintain them. These works get their strength from laboriously human-built databases and visible human tinkering. Their practices discredit or deconstruct corporate and state archives, networks, and surveillance systems. Instead they draw attention to the agency of individuals, self-organized collectives, and archival materials. In this way they make visible the processes whereby material life is distilled into information, which in turn is sculpted like plastic form. For example, Saudi artist Ahmed Mater studies the infrastructure of Mecca’s algorithmic patterns in Artificial Light (2012). Moroccan artist Mounir Fatmi’s video installations, including Les Temps Modernes, une Histoire de la Machine (2010) and Speed City (2010) investigate the performative function of holy algorithms, pious sayings in decorative kufic, naskhi, and thuluth script by building them into slightly menacing machine- and cityscapes. The fragility of human algorithms reveals itself in Egyptian artist Magdi Mustafa’s The Surface of Spectral Shattering (2014), a 600-square-meter installation that evokes Cairo's electrical grid. Video works and live performances by other artists use analytic software to extract patterns from social media, making perceptible the emergent agency of enormous numbers of individual humans. Selected references Galison, Peter. “Images Scatter into Data, Data Gather into Images,” in Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art, ed. Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour (Karlsruhe: ZKM, 2002), 300-322. Goriunova, Olga, and Alexei Shulgin, "Glitch," in Software Studies: A Lexicon, ed. Matthew Fuller (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). Ladwig, Patrice, Rocardo Roque, Oliver Tappe, Christoph Kohl, and Cristiana Bastos. "Fieldwork Between Folders: Fragments, Traces, and the Ruins of the Colonial Archive," Max Planck Institute Working Papers, no. 141 (2012), 4.