SIAT Speaker Series: Data Imaginaries with Dr. Audrey Desjardins
0s and 1s on a screen. The Cloud. Fast moving. Clean. Efficient. Exponentially growing. Data Centres. Code on the black screen of a terminal window. Buzzing. Such images construct part of commonly shared imaginaries around data. As data increasingly become part of the most intimate parts of people’s lives (often at home), it remains a largely invisible phenomenon. In particular, one of the leading challenges currently facing Internet of Things (IoT) is algorithmic transparency and accountability with regards to how IoT data are collected, what is inferred and who they are shared with. From a home dweller’s perspective, data may be available for review and reflection via graphs, spreadsheets, and dashboards (if at all available!).
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In this talk, Desjardins instead argues for other modes of encountering IoT data: ways that are creative, critical, subtle, performative, and at times analog or fictional. By translating data into ceramic artifacts, performance and interactive installation experiments, fiction stories, imagined sounds, faded fabric, and even data cookies, Desjardins show a diversity of approaches for engaging data that might capture people’s attention and imagination. As a result, this work uncovers ways to make data more real, showing its messiness and complexities, and opens questions about how data might be interpreted, and by whom.