fields

Every-thing is an Instrument

Three events that reflect on practitioners entanglements within complex data ecologies revealed the tensions of having material (data) extracted by platform technologies, as well as the position of authoring artefacts that rely on deriving data from other sources.

1. McKenzie Wark, This Hideous Replica:  In her talk RMIT University Capitol Theatre, McKenzie Wark discussed the evolution of authorship, from automatic to automated writing, critiquing AI’s role in literature and the exploitation of free culture. Walk highlighted the shift from holistic to prescriptive technologies and the impact of platforms such as OpenAI, Google and Amazon on literary production. Recovering Benjamin Bratton’s concept of the stack that describes the “privately owned infrastructures that coordinate activity through a series of layers that capture value and extract a surplus”, Wark asks us to reconsider our place within these digital ecologies. From a position in which contributions of creative work were made into collections and archives, move to becoming subsumed within Large Language Models, Walk demands different tactics…

“let’s think about language, about how to have agency using language, or better, having agency over the way language uses us. Let’s find language that isn’t just the repetition of habits or novelties promoted at us for the purpose of selling us the bill of goods.”

2. Designing with Data: Responsible Practice As curators within these cultural digital ecologies, ACMI play a role in exhibiting those that have made works (and may be subject to have work extracted), and communities that make work (who may be involved in using data from other sources). Last week I was part of a panel at ACMI alongside Seb Chan (CEO), Joel Gethin Lewis (Co-Director, Universal Everything) and chaired by Lucie Paterson (Head of Experience, Digital & Insights) that explored the need for context, relationality, and the acknowledgement of missing data sources in cultural productions. The panel discussed the importance of understanding data’s origins and the potential for noise and resistance in data sets, advocating for a more inclusive and collaborative approach to data management and representation.

My own provocation suggested that every-thing has become an instrument of data capture and “The questions are… where did the pixels come from? As you see the world through instruments, you have to start looking past the first superficial, the ACMI sign, the Beings show… Where did the data come from that produced these phenomenon?”

“Data, you know, is relational and contextual. It’s historical. Data doesn’t tell you what the future is. It is rooted in context and a past. And when you’re making data visualizations, data is missing. There’s always missing data. So, it’s really important to show the context and reveal its relationality.”  Seb.

“I think that will be my provocation to throw back to Chris [who is] saying that everything’s been instrumentalised, everything’s been measured. Are there things out there that can’t be measured? Is nature, in fact, made of bits? And I mean that in all senses of the word binary digits, which is what bits means, or in fact, little discrete chunks of things, or is it continuous? Is it a field? Can things change suddenly? Or do they, in fact, vary?” Joel Gethin Lewis

The sandwich of quotes speaks to the challenge that Walk lays down: how do creatives rethink their practice as data-driven technologies strip us of the book, the movie, the artefact that we were paining over? As large scale instruments, digital economies will continue to dismantle the ‘thing’ that we thought we were making and break it down into atomised units for repurpose.

One way through the morass is Giorgo Lupi’s Data Humanism micro-manifesto:

“Big Data doesn’t belong to a distant dystopian future; it’s a commodity and an intrinsic and iconic feature of our present — like dollars, concrete, automobiles, and Helvetica. The ways we relate to data are evolving more rapidly than we realize, and our minds and bodies are naturally adapting to this new hybrid reality built of both physical and informational structures.And visual design — with its power to instantly reach out to places in our subconscious without the mediation of language, and with its inherent ability to convey large amounts of structured and unstructured information across cultures — is going to be even more central to this silent but inevitable revolution.” https://giorgialupi.com/data-humanism-my-manifesto-for-a-new-data-wold

3. Jennifer Walsh “Is It Cool to Try Hard Now?” Walks resistance to the automation of subjectivity was followed by Jennifer Walsh and her performance titled “Is It Cool to Try Hard Now?” (2017), extraordinary embodiment (at times possession) of her voice through experiments with neural networks. Although the RMIT performance isn’t available (yet) this interview and excerpts of the performance provides a taste of the work – created before ChatGPT / MidJourney / Dall-E became part of our lives.

End note:

The phrase “what gets measured, gets manages” is not going away, and remains at the heart of the reductionist datafication of everything we know. What then might be a better phrase to reboot a regenerative starting point..?

“What is understood and respected shapes how we care and relate.”

“What we value and engage with shapes our shared futures.”

“What we notice and nurture informs how we co-exist and flourish.”

On leaving Design Informatics, University of Edinburgh I’m finding a strong community in Melbourne that are prepared to challenge the claim that “what gets measured gets managed”, and through data literacy, creatives may well ask what measurement looks if we decide to manage planets as well as economies.