talk
17/11/2023
Ruhr-University Bochum
ECF conference, CRC »Virtual Lifeworlds«, Ruhr-University Bochum 16-17 November 2023 Virtuality is growing: as ubiquitous and immersive media technologies mature, more and more aspects of our everyday lives are being permeated by virtual practices. Increasing proportions of our cultural archives are being made available as virtual objects, and major players in the tech industry have declared virtual spaces to be central arenas for future economic growth. This growing together of physical and virtual spaces is transforming our cultural, social and political spheres more and more. However, in times of climate crisis and global environmental catastrophe, technological growth is increasingly seen not just as an economic promise, but as an existential threat, consuming vast amounts of energy and other material resources. This two-day conference seeks to ask about the implications of the seemingly unlimited growth of virtuality – and to look for alternative models. In four sessions, guests and members of the CRC will discuss themes surrounding ‘Actors/Acting’, ‘Economy’, ‘Data: Archiving and Virtualization’ and ‘Experience’. Session ‘Data: Archiving and Virtualization’ The virtualization of more and more aspects of our daily lives is generating unprecedented amounts of data, from the masses of transactional metadata involved in everyday online communication, to the flows of user-generated content on social media platforms and the growing volumes of digitized documents, artworks, and cultural artifacts collected in virtual archives. For big tech companies, all of these and other types of “big data” are hardly more than resources to be exploited through data- mining and the training of machine learning algorithms, but the vast amounts of data now available also allow for new forms of research, activism and archiving that may counter such corporate forms of data colonialism. The session "Data: Archiving and Virtualization" aims to bring together actors from the fields of digital activism and artistic research who collect, preserve, and analyze visual data to explore decolonial forms of access to cultural archives, document human rights violations, and question hegemonic modes of knowledge production. Questions to be discussed include how virtualization can help to foster new data literacies, what forms of epistemic violence are embodied in the protocols of both commercial platforms and cultural institutions, and what technologies, media, formats, and skills are needed to deal with large amounts of data in non-extractivist ways.