Data is captured, recorded, analysed, displayed and presented as reality. Reality thus becomes increasingly shaped by abstraction based on probabilities and patterns that are tailored to individual needs. The balance between immediate experience and socially mediated conceptions and collected and processed data is changing in favour of the latter so that today we speak of data-driven societies. If our relationship with the world is mediated by an automated process of collecting and processing data and recommendations for behaviour based on this same data, and we find confirmation that this is so every day, then we must ask ourselves where in such a society is the space for our intervention in the world.
Considering how data is generated in such systems, Wendy Chun concludes that a change of state is necessary, things must be in motion in order to be recorded and become data. And she continues, “people who engage in heavily captured activity have a certain freedom, namely, free creation within a system of rules. They can optimize their actions, so that their effort is decreased or their recorded productivity is increased; they can become more rather than less skilful. In more cynical colloquial terms, users can game the system.” Intervention is necessary in the “lively data” itself, as Deborah Lupton calls the constant generation of a mass of digital data that becomes part of everyday life.
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These interventions, which you will have the opportunity to meet at the Unreal Data exhibition (Filodrammatica Gallery, 30 March – 28 April, 2023), designed by Carmen and Domagoj from the !Mediengruppe Bitnik collective, open up an important question, is it possible to create new realities by modifying/altering data streams.
The public conversation about unreal data (large hall of Filodrammatica, 31 March, 2023 at 7 p.m.) continues as an extension of the exhibition. It is conceived as a space for the exchange of opinions about the way in which our societies are transformed under the influence of automated data collection and processing, and how we as individuals adapt to this situation. Members of the collectives !Mediengruppe Bitnik and RYBN, Felix Stalder, Srećko Horvat, Gordan Savičić, Mario Santamaría, Marcell Mars and all of you who join us will take part in the conversation.
More information:
http://drugo-more.hr/en/mine-yours-ours-2023/
