A Data-Driven Drama

While progressively churning all aspects of life into data, the digital escapes conventional material methods of observation and measurement. Digital materiality has been addressed by numerous media, communication and infrastructure studies, often focusing on a single effect like their carbon footprint, as the principal measure of anthropogenic pollution in the ongoing climate crisis. My research is concerned with expanding the perspective on digital materiality. Such a perspective should be able to include unlike dimensions in a perfromance: the design of graphical interfaces, internet users labour, their emotional states, purchase decisions, rare mineral mining and the labour of assembling electronic devices, automated collection of user data, financial transactions within AdTech markets, energy consumption and carbon-footprint of these processes. In this talk, I will focus on reading digital materiality through the operations of internet-based platforms and their immersive grip on users. In particular, I will propose performance-based methods to experience these operations through staging. The convergence of space, time, networks and bodies in the performative medium relates and renders experienceable the otherwise incommunicable material entanglements. If we are, as Chun suggested, characters in a ‘big data’ drama, then exposing the drama is to expose the roles and scripts that are in place, enabling them to be questioned and possibly undone.

Speaker: Selena Savic (Critical Media Lab, FHNW)