infrastructure walk “Data Walk as Method” at the Data Power Conference in Graz/Bangalore September 2024
Talk in the panel BP3: Reimagining Data (in Bangalore location), Friday 09:00 CEST, 12:30 IST, room B-RM R305.
The proposed panel brings together scholars and artists for methodological reflections on data walk as an empirical method and social practice. Data walk as a method emerged recently as a creative method employed by academics and artists for a variety of purposes from public engagement and project-based education to artistic research, or as a means of data collection for straightforward empirical studies. Loitering in urban public spaces of data infrastructures as a way to check our assumptions about more abstract notions of data power is the sensitivity that may connect these approaches. Nonetheless, the sensitivities go back historically and philosophically to the works of Walter Benjamin on the flaneur, the Situationist International on psychogeography, and to hacker practices such as wardriving.
After the fervent period of experimentation that describes the last few years, does it make sense now to discuss classical methodological issues such as canonisation, normative criteria, or the affordances and limitations of the interpretative power of the data walk methodology? In other words, what is a programmatic data walk? What is a successfully performed data walk? What data walks are suitable to address what epistemological questions? Which uses are there for data walks in academic life and artistic research?
A symposium on the topic is to be held Sprint 2025 at the University of Utrecht, bringing the results of the discussion at the data power conference to dedicated practitioners.
