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DATA PUBLICS: PUBLIC PLURALITY IN AN ERA OF DATA DETERMINACY
DATA PUBLICS’s research activities led to the major publication Data Publics: Public Plurality in an Era of Data Determinacy, edited by Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer (Routledge, 2020). This book includes texts by artists, theorists, and cultural practitioners worldwide, and marks the culmination of the five-year arts-based research project DATA PUBLICS. The publication can be ordered via Routledge.
Data has emerged as a key component that determines how interactions across the world are structured, mediated and represented. This book examines these new data publics and the areas in which they become operative, via analysis of politics, geographies, environments and social media platforms.
By claiming to offer a mechanism to translate every conceivable occurrence into an abstract code that can be endlessly manipulated, digitally processed data has caused conventional reference systems which hinge on our ability to mark points of origin, to rapidly implode. Authors from a range of disciplines provide insights into such a political economy of data capitalism; the political possibilities of techno-logics beyond data appropriation and data refusal; questions of visual, spatial and geographical organization; emergent ways of life and the environments that sustain them; and the current challenges of data publics, which is explored via case studies of three of the most influential platforms in the social media economy today: Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp.
Data Publics will be of great interest to academics and students in the fields of computer science, philosophy, sociology, media and communication studies, architecture, visual culture, art and design, and urban and cultural studies.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
Section One: Politics
Matthew Fuller
In Praise of Plasticity
Luciana Parisi and Ezekiel Dixon-Román
Data Capitalism, Sociogenic Prediction and Recursive Indeterminacies
Ignacio Valero
Emotariat Accelerationism and the Republic of Data
Section Two: Environments
Stephen Graham
Unearthly Domain: the enigmatic data publics of satellites
Jennifer Gabrys
Sensing Air and Creaturing Data
Benj Gerdes
Offsite: data, materiality, landscape, compression
Louis Moreno
Fracking Sociality: architecture, real estate and the internet’s new urbanism
Section Three: Platforms
Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer
City-Making in the Age of Platforms
Lev Manovich
The Aesthetic Society
Ravi Sundaram
Publics or Post-Publics? Contemporary expression after the mobile Phone
Futher information here
Autogena Projects (Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway)
Formulating New Aesthetics for a Data-Saturated World
All data lives within a frame of reference. Data is meaningless outside the system, which encodes it. When we’ve worked with data it’s always been in the service of thinking about these underlying structures and systems rather than the data itself. Here we present three projects: Untitled (superorganism), Black Shoals and Most Blue Skies – each of which, in their way, chronicle our changing ideas about the relationships between capitalism, nature and technology, and the ways in which we might respond to them.
Black Shoals [1999, 2015] is ostensibly a visualisation of the global financial system, in which the flows of global capital are represented by a planetarium in which every star represents a company traded on the world’s stock markets. Amongst the stars live a colony of artificial life creatures who feed on the movements of capital. The project was, in part, a reaction to the naturalisation of the system of global capitalism in which the market is increasingly perceived as a mysterious force of nature rather than an artefact of culture. Since the seventies the language of complexity theory has built a bridge between biological ecologies and financial systems that has served to reinforce the legitimacy and the “naturalness” of the market. The emergence of complex behaviour from dynamic systems has become the dominant touchstone of “nature”. Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand is now recognised as a feedback property of a self-organising ecology, and this seems to position it as a comparably fundamental force. We used a similar feedback effect as part of the work we produced in response to the “Monument to the Anthropocene” exhibition; “Untitled [Superorganism]”. The project was a re-creation in the gallery of an “ant mill” – a phenomenon in which hundreds of thousands of army ants lose their pheromone trail and begin to follow each other in an endlessly rotating circle until exhaustion and death.
Most Blue Skies is an attempt to come to some sort of peace with the very problematic idea of nature and its relationship to the technological and social systems in which we’re embedded. The project is a quixotic attempt to answer a simple childhood question – where is the bluest sky in the world? We approached the problem using the most advanced resources available to us, including satellite sensing, atmospheric modelling, real time sensor networks and radiative transfer models developed by NASA. There is an apparent paradox between the simple prelapsarian beauty of the blue sky and the disproportionate complexity of the technology we employ to try to answer the question. The work struggles to resolve this paradox in a synthesis, which hopefully emerges as a more optimistic aesthetic for a data-saturated world.
Simon Yuill
There has been a great deal of interest in how capital has intervened in almost every area of life, leading some to propose new forms of labour and capital e.g. ‘immaterial labour’ and ‘emotional capitalism’, and others to suggest that processes of valuation are now the major method for understanding the social world. This has become particularly evident in the processes through which social media platforms, such as Facebook, generate immense financial value from the exchange of what for some people appears to be often mundane and value-less information. The relation between time and value (defined in various ways) is integral to the accumulation of capital in this context and it is evident that algorithms play an important mediating role. Analysis of this, however, has often been largely speculative due to the difficulties of obtaining empirical data. Furthermore, despite being a medium that is engaged with over time, and one that is often intimately intertwined with the rhythms of its users' daily lives, platforms such as Facebook have rarely been studied from a temporal perspective. As part of a study of the transformation of personal value into financial value through social media, the Values & Value project has developed a set of custom software tools that combine several intersecting perspectives of temporal activity across participants' use of Facebook, how they are tracked by Facebook as they browse the web, and how it fits within their daily routine. The project has been able to gather forms of empirical data not previously utilised in such research. In analysing this, we propose that platforms such as Facebook effect an attunement between different temporal activities, from personal social interactions to speculative investments in advertising and the circulation of capital within financialisation. Capital is captured from interventions within these circulations rather than from direct production. This suggests a different relation between time, technicity and capital from that of the industrial factory and recent concepts of the social factory. This relation between time, technicity and capital as attunement is analysed through concepts drawn from Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis in which different rhythms interact with one another in ways that do not simply correlate but are rather conflictual and overdetermining. In doing so the project seeks to make more explicit the ways in which algorithms intervene in and constitute processes of the capture of value and circulation of capital. In this talk, Simon Yuill will present the custom software tools that were created for the project, the approach to visualisation used within these, and how they relate to the larger themes of our analysis.
Cecilia Wee and Dani Admiss
Co-Building Worlds: Data-Discourses and Other Stories
_#Data-Capitalism; #Curating; #Collaborative-storytelling; #Data-Discourse. This performance-based research and praxis presentation presents the curatorial project ‘PostHuman Unit for NeuroCapitalism’ (PHUNC), a research and design unit engaged in co-creating new visions of post-consumer and postproducer subjectivities through community-based neuro and data-capitalist research. Against a backdrop of new neuros (Pykett) and largescale technoscientific information structures forming super-advanced capitalism’s new frontiers for growth (Neidich), PHUNC proposes that the challenge for those working in arts, technology and social change today is to design interventional acts of ‘radical sensing’ that expand on ‘representational forms that enable articulations of change’ (Rossiter) embracing an experimental process of curating as world-building, a way of taking on personal entanglement and global complexity (Haraway) in response to the normative economic and epistemic goals outlined by data capitalism.
Over a period of two months, the curators collated reports from a worldwide network of PHUNC researchers working in arts and cultural contexts, as well within think-tanks, policy-based organisations and higher education. They asked PHUNC researchers to reflect on how data works in relation to local agency, the identities produced through globalised work and consumption, and the negotiations materialising for people operating in opposition to dominant frameworks of data-discourses within the Capitalocene (Moore). This highly specific evidence forms the basis of a collaborative performative narrative to be presented to the forum audience: emerging worldviews from a variegated set of lived geographic and socio-economic realities under the umbrella of ‘data capitalism’. Bookending the presentation, the curators discuss evolving methods to working with complex, contradictory and chaotic subject matters in the arts and analyse this specific technique of collaborative storytelling.
Christian Frieß and Benjamin Gerdes
There is the seductive fiction of a reality, in which all actions and events can be integrated into a digital system that enables maximum efficiency, sustainability, security, and satisfaction of needs and desires of every (selected) individual. It is a fiction of unity and frictionlessness built on the assumption of a set of perfectly working and seamlessly integrated machines. But the truth is, machines don´t always work that well.
Juxtaposing sober patent drawings of urban digital technologies with photographs depicting their problematic implementation, Christian Frieß and Benjamin Gerdes’ project "User Environments in the Interface City" makes visible the problematic relationship of technology-driven imaginations and their broken real world doppelgangers.
"User Environments in the Interface City" is the outcome of a Fulbright Specialist project hosted by TUW’s Visual Culture Unit. It has been published on the occasion of the project "halfway - Curating the Urban" and in cooperation with the "Centre for Global Architecture", Vienna, 2019.
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Working in close collaboration with researchers involved in the Visual Culture Unit, we run a modular set of courses for the Master of Architecture programme at TU Vienna. The Visual Culture module aims to apply the transdisciplinary approach of Visual Culture to the field of architecture and to advance this field of enquiry. Seminars and workshops with international artists, such as Stealth, Maurice Benayoun, Igor Grubic, Stefan Rusu or Fallen Fruit form an important part of this bringing together of theory and practice.
In keeping with the global oriention of Visual Culture the programme puts emphasis on international exchange and inter-universitary collaboration: There is cooperation with, amongst others, the Cultural Studies programme of the University of Vienna and its partner organisations, the University of Applied Arts Vienna, the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, as well as with the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Student Projects:
Working in close collaboration with researchers involved in the Visual Culture Unit, we run a modular set of courses for the Master of Architecture programme at TU Vienna. The Visual Culture module aims to apply the transdisciplinary approach of Visual Culture to the field of architecture and to advance this field of enquiry. Seminars and workshops with international artists, such as Stealth, Maurice Benayoun, Igor Grubic, Stefan Rusu or Fallen Fruit form an important part of this bringing together of theory and practice.
In keeping with the global oriention of Visual Culture the programme puts emphasis on international exchange and inter-universitary collaboration: There is cooperation with, amongst others, the Cultural Studies programme of the University of Vienna and its partner organisations, the University of Applied Arts Vienna, the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, as well as with the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Ludovica Battista
CAPITAL CLOUDS - Milan Urban Forecasts
Milan is rising: since Expo god-touched power has put it into the spotlight, a new urban turn is coming and money are raining down on the city. They are dripping all over the place, in the name of urban regeneration, the sumptuous narrative of development and social change. But what water are these clouds made of? Where did those money evaporate from? The project starts with the analysis of, to keep the metaphor, a mere puddle, BASE in Tortona area, only to discover the underground flow that connects it to the main urban changes, trying to expose the economic structure and meaning of the capitals hidden under shiny promises. These clouds are made for profit, and there’s nothing natural about them.
So, they say it’s regeneration, baby. We’re gonna have more green space, cycle paths, ecological buildings, and our city lifestyle is gonna improve to become healtier and easier. It’s gonna be social, support the local actors and start from the weakiest neighborhoods, the post-industrial polluted grounds in the middle of this big, beautiful city, that scream to be renovated and given back to the citiziens. And we’re gonna have it all, the renders are telling the truth, the skyscrapers are no enemy, they are just designed on a bigger scale, but hey, it’s because this city is becoming international, so it’s good: we’re attiring tourists, agencies; that’s even better after Brexit, ‘cause we may have missed EMA but there will be other opportunities. The city council is being of tremendous help, as soon as they see that someone wants to spend money to improve the city, they give them authorizations, they hold competitions, they even help with the money themselves, because that’s how you attract more investors; I mean, in the end the invested money will come back in various forms to all citiziens who provided them by paying taxes. Because of course, they say, this operations will help all social classes, a lot of resources are stacked for this and that difficult block, one or two kindegardens are opening and maybe even a library, we just need to get rid of the possible problems with protests from the inhabitants, you know. There’s always a loud minority of troublemakers that doesn’t understand progress. On the rare occasions when some report or investigation reveals strange economic flows behind these constructon sites, they say it’s all fake news, the money for the interventions don’t come from Saudi Arabia petrol, and even if they were there is no problem, it’s no ISIS, it’s the good guys that want to spend their patrimonies in the Old Europe to expand their commercial horizons, and yes, obviously that rents are NOT rising, but even if they were, well, there have been emprovements, right? There’s a price to pay from emprovements, they don’t come for free for anyone! People being kicked out of their homes? Completely false, unless they already were actual homeless or defaulting and were ILLEGALLY occupying a space they didn’t pay for at all: that’s the law, it’s not bad. They say it’s culture, it’s public, it’s safe, but the percentages tell us a different story, more complex, with only one word at the heart of every process: PROFIT. It’s no collective good we’re talking about, it is the profit for the few, and it is taking over the cities, turning every corner in a space of consumption, all wearing the shiny armour of a positive urban process, that makes everything deeply contradictory and confused. This analysis tries to draw down pure facts: the change in the shape of the city, as seen from the sky as powerful people do when they picture it, the actors of the change (animated, the architects, and unanimated, the symbol-buildings), the means of the change (money, urban plans, transportation system changes overall), the words and the images they use to sugarcoat all of it. It is an attempt to expose the mask under which neoliberism is shaping or living space, to prepare our resistance and encourage other people’s one.
Alexander Garber
Platforms have the capabilities to change our perception of the built environment or alter the urban fabric itself. This axiom can be understood as a common ground in our collective effort to understand the effects of Platforms on the city; to get a vague premonition of what Platform Urbanism might be.
I want to understand my contribution to this collective project as basic research. By taking the perspective of platforms this project strives to analyse what kind of definitions of cities platforms operate with, how they are defined and how they are communicated. Understanding the actors, mechanisms and motivation of these definitions might be a crucial fragment of understanding the Platforms mentioned and supposed abilities to alter our own definitions.
Tim Felix Weber
WEWORK AND THE AGE OF APPRECIATION
WeWork Companies Inc. is a private enterprise based in New York City. Founded in 2010 as a start-up offering co-working spaces to other start-ups and freelancers it has now increasingly been made available to medium-sized businesses and large companies as well. WeWork pursues an aggressive growth strategy funded largely upon big investments by the Japanese Softbank Group. WeWork is currently valued at 47 billion USD. The company operates in over a 100 cities in 27 countries2 and has ventured into other businesses such as WeLive (co-living spaces), Rise by We (a gym with spa) and WeGrow (an elementary school). All these business ventures will be bundled under the newly formed The We Company.
We Work’s business model is renting spaces from landlords, building up the interior according to their corporate design and renting out the spaces to its "members". The design and layout of WeWork spaces combines elements of the Californian start-up scene (bars, hang-out spaces, board games) and contemporary Scandinavian interior design. WeWork’s members have access to an internal social network. Following the company’s objective as a "community company", social events and workshops are supposed to create a community within the members, the so-called "We Generation".
In the present work, I try to trace the basic ideology and ambition of WeWork based on sections of selected interviews and speeches by WeWork Co-Founder and CEO, Adam Neumann. WeWork is a platform that wants to integrate many, if not all aspects of life. As such it is an ideal subject for testing Michel Feher’s theory of the Neoliberal Condition. Feher describes and deduces his theory in a lecture series called The Age of Appreciation: Lectures on the Neoliberal Condition, hosted by the Department of Visual Cultures and Forensic Architecture at the Goldsmiths University of London. He establishes underlying, interdependent principals of economics, psychology and sociality of our contemporary culture and their transformation through the past. In the following I will give a very brief summary of his theory.
Feher discusses two preceding eras or conditions to the Neoliberal Condition, the Augustinian Condition and the Liberal Condition. The Augustinian Condition dates back to the 5th century named after Augustine of Hippo. Its central psychology is one cultivating humility in light of accepting human sinfulness like lust, greed and pride. Its economy is one of generating god’s grace in order to produce charity. So the Augustinian Condition produces a sociality of gift, therefore the function of government is fostering humility.
The Liberal Condition emerges in the 18th century. Its psychology is one of maximising profit. Its economy is about generating prosperity by means of individual profit. More specific, the deployment of individual selfishness creates collective prosperity through the invisible hand of the market economy with the assumption that exchange and competition lead to growth. The three pillars of the liberal economy is first private property, second freedom to dispose of what one owns and third respect for contractural commitments. So its government is about promoting and regulating exchanges.
The Neoliberal Condition is born out of a project of liberal economists after the second world war to ward off the prediction of creeping socialism through technocracy and bureaucracy by restoring competition and entrepreneurship and thus saving classical liberalism. However the taken measures, led to the Neoliberal or financialized Condition. Its psychology is one of maximising self-esteem and credit. Its economy is about sustaining capital value through credit. Feher’s definition of credit is: Prospected profit minus doubts about that prospect. This leads to the ascent of the financial market. The sociality of that condition is based on sharing, so the neoliberal government is about facilitating sharing. The corresponding institution of each condition is the church for the Augustinian Condition, the market for Liberal Condition and for the Neoliberal Condition, the platform.
In the following two chapters each page is divided in three continuous columns. The main body of text occupies the middle column and contains transcribed sections of interviews with and speeches by Adam Neumann. The left-hand column contains transcripts featuring Adam Neumann or his wife Co-Founder of WeWork and CEO of WeGrow, Rebekah Paltrow Neumann or articles relating to the main body of text. The right-hand column contains comments by the author and tests Michel Feher theory of the Neoliberal Condition on statements from the main body of text.
Sonja Lutz
WIENLIEBE
Most images that are marked with the hashtag #WienLiebe contain elements that are associated with emotions of "love" - or at least with the idea of romance. Even if these associations can be objectively attached to the visual content of the image, the viewer's perception is subjective and cannot be grasped by computers. The descriptions of the images (machine-generated tags) that translate pixels into code naturally exclude many associations and focus on the "objective" (computer-recognizable) content only.
The following pages include images that have been published under the hashtag #WienLiebe in which those elements, that evoke emotional reactions, are marked. These images are juxtaposed with snippets of code that contain machine-generated tags based on image recognition software.
Mathias Hofer
SMART City Lighting
Smart Lighting systems are ever more connected and software driven, becoming an important enabler for the Internet of Things (IoT). When connected, lighting systems have a vastly increased attack surface. Connectivity also opens the door for attacks that originate from a remote location. To protect company-confidential data, customer data, and other corporate assets secure, the mapping shows that companies need to design their connected systems with proper security measures in place, and ensure that they are properly deployed by installers and customers.
Bilal Alame, Mary Osibanjo
PLATFORM REACTANCY
Mobile phones are the biggest culprits in data collection. Even in their idle state, information is collected, analyzed and distributed. Check your mobile device and note down the applications that are actively in use. Some have come with the purchase of your mobile device, others you have downloaded yourself. Turn on your device, and locate your application settings. Most of the apps you use are likely to have access to information such as your location, storage, camera, calender and contacts list. Some of those permissions will seem odd to you, others an understandable privacy trade-off. Can a Google Chrome access to your microphone, for example, be truly justified? Awareness is key to privacy.
Providing one platform with access to your data doesn't equate giving access to third parties. Often times, platforms regard third parties as an extension of their own company and therefore don't feel obliged to inform you of the identity of their 'trusted partners'. A lot of applications are connected to bigger platforms, such as Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon. Those companies are connected to hundreds of other platforms, that are hard to track down. Apps like Ghostery and Disconnect help make those connections visible; connections where third parties could have access to your data. The more people demand transparency, the more policies will begin to change. Apple for example, has updated its privacy settings, in 2018, enabling users to download and view the data, Apple has been collecting through their Apple ID. You too can request to view your data on any Apple device. Understanding the transactions is key to making an educated decision.