Tag Archives: agency

For an Erotics of Data

“The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.

… the erotic is not a question of only what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing.”
Audre Lorde,”Uses of the Erotic” (1978)

In our contemporary technological societies we are swamped by data. Almost our every action and behaviour is now measured, collated, processed and inscribed as data somewhere by something for someone. Data leaks from us much as our skin sheds dead cells: a digital dust that accumulates all over the online world – often in places we are barely aware of. Such places are frequently private repositories, networks and systems the scope of which we have little perception, let alone access to. This leakage then becomes mixed with other types and forms of data to become something like a viscous film that subsequently pervades and coats the diverse environments we inhabit and, indeed, even fills the very air we breathe through the waves of its electro-magnetic transmissions. As our lives progress it begins to cloy our options and choices, accreting invisibly to whatever options we are offered by automated decision-making systems. It affects our lives in ways we struggle to discern, always with the nagging sense that some traces of what we have done previously have somehow become determinants in how our personal world is being progressively shaped by these external forces.

How can we empower ourselves through a relationship with and to data? Not just to be its subjects, carried along by unfeeling, reductive logics? To be empowered would require us to assume agency, to directly engage in the processes of making meaning from data, not simply accept the outputs of machine determined processes and systems. It would be an opportunity for us to re-define our relationship to data not just on purely functional bases, but in an embodied way, encompassing all that it is to be a sentient, sensual being.

Eroticism is one of humanity’s key modes for experiencing pleasure and satisfaction – not just in terms of sexual gratification – but in terms of the quality of our engagements and experiences with ourselves, each other and the worlds we inhabit. The erotic is a model in which completion and quantity are held in tension with partial revelation, incompleteness and fragments. Rather than a whole panorama of behaviour, the erotic is effected through glimpses, shards of a spectrum. It is a space of creativity and exchange that is playful and transcendent of intention and mere function. It is always a site of negotiation, but not necessarily one of direct transaction between participants – singular or multiple. Humans imbue things with an eroticism through the power of our imaginations. It is fundamentally individual, but can be shared. Participation, though, is only through directly experiencing something as truly erotic, otherwise it is false, a sham.

We are entering an era of climate impacts, pandemics and their consequences, and there is a sense of urgency that we should seek new ways to define ourselves as actors – not simply as subjects or victims. It seems to me that an erotics of data presents us with a powerful means to embrace and become empowered by the revelations that working with data can bring us. Why should we not be stimulated and aroused by data as we are by other forms of recording and communicating things of value? If we can be pleased by the shape and form of things, then why not by the shapes and forms of data? Can they be crafted in ways that allow such potential? Can we embed something irreducibly human at the very heart of how we interact with our systems of computation and analysis? Something that must be felt not just thought about?

How might we clothe ourselves in data, yet also be able to change and put it off much as we change our clothes according to mood, to sense of occasion or just whimsy? Clothes never truly change the reality of who we are, yet they do help us adopt different behaviours, or alter the way in which we might be seen by others. Clothes can be, and have been more formally in earlier historical times, part of how we construct our personal identity, or identities, and how we project those identities to the world around. Yet in our contemporary world, they are not considered to be part of our essential being. Clothes play a powerful role in our concepts of erotics and our erotic behaviours towards each other – signifiers of many states and fluidities, from the protective and safe to zones of connection and invitation. How might we dress ourselves as nimbly, as flexibly in data? For it to be an active material of identity that we choose to enfold us, rather than a filmy detritus that coats us unbidden and which we are barely able to scrub off? How can we make use of the properties of personal data without it necessarily becoming a piece of property, an asset that accumulates and sticks to us, weighs us down and limits our abilities or opportunities?

What certainly exists in the present moment is a veritable deluge of data, both captured, synthesised and modelled. And there are whole sectors of human society who are in the midst of an orgiastic frenzy of analysis and meta-analyses of not just the data itself, but of all the potential inferences that the systems and deployments of “artificial intelligence” can possibly be attuned to generate. It is becoming both a mainstay of our industrial, globalised transactional economy, and part of the infrastructure of how we exist and our identities are constructed and validated.

Could it be possible for us to take pleasure in being metaphorically washed over by this deluge of data, just as we might stand purposefully in a rainstorm, our senses alive to the energy of the elements and the forces of nature? How so? What kind of different relations might need to come into play for such a thing to be possible?

To be empowered is feel yourself able to make demands of others you may have been afraid or unwilling to before. It is to give yourself permission to ask to be treated with equality and equitably. It is to see yourself as an agent of choice, not just one who is acted upon and channelled by the choices of others. It is to define your own measures of value and quality, not simply to accept those of others foist upon us by hierarchies, customs and conventions. In this, the erotic is a powerful expression of how we choose to take pleasure, to measure joy and fulfilment in our lives. It is an intensely personal, individual yardstick by which we can measure the honesty of our own claims to personal agency. For something can only feel erotic to us if we truly experience it. We all know when we are faking.

For these reasons, when confronted by the authoritarian potential of mass data surveillance, by how trammelled our lives and choices could easily become as the data collected and processed about us grows ever more detailed and fine-grained, I suggest that developing an erotics of data could be a fantastically subversive, even undermining, strategy for empowerment and autonomy. Against the backdrop of vast quantities of data being greedily hoovered up by governments and corporations as yet another vector of social control, it offers a glimmer of hope for some freedom. Just as humour punctures and deflates authority, the erotic is outside the pale of polite convention. It is hard to control, hard to police – the more it is repressed, the more pressure builds up and it eventually erupts in unexpected ways and places. Even in submission, there can be an erotics which subverts domination.

Rather than as an asset class, or an object of capital and profit, could we re-cast our concept and perception of data as elements of flow, like molecules of water? Something which makes up our world, is an important element of ourselves to which we contribute and from which we can draw, but which is never entirely personal? What does it take for us to step aside from our habitual practices and deferences to demand a different path? As our societies experience a pause in their frenetic everyday momentum can we reflect on what kind of world we want to re-emerge into? What kinds of relationships to each other, to systems and polities, to states and exceptions do we want? What can and should we demand?

Cooperation is the foundation of human societies, it flourishes on diversity and differences – our desires and appetites whetted by the dynamic between the familiar and the novel, what we are capable of ourselves and what we need others to provide for or to complement us. Power is, ultimately, only wielded through the consent of the governed – however quiet or seemingly unconscious it may be. History is full of eruptions when that consent is withdrawn or simply evaporates.

To demand a new social contract for our data is a threshold we can only pass through by active, intentional choice. A contract that also gives us, the people, a fair say in how our data is generated, collected, stored, processed and used – one in which there could be the potential for an erotics of data to emerge. It is to imagine a very different world to the one we currently inhabit, which has been imagined and crafted to privilege a select few beneficiaries, with the costs distributed across the rest of us and the heaviest burden placed squarely on the living planet and its future. If we choose instead to cooperate with our own desires and imaginations we might engender a radically different future altogether.

“Recognising the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama.”
Audre Lorde,”Uses of the Erotic” (1978)

London, April 2020

Listen to Audre Lorde speaking on “Uses of the Erotic” (YouTube)

People Centric Practices: a field guide

Back in May this year I published a small booklet – A Field Guide for People Centric Practices.

This contains my personal reflections on what a set of principles for working from a people-centric perspective might be. For me, people centric practice implies not just a human centred approach, but one which encompasses the whole context in which we live and work, and impacts on other creatures and lifeforms that are part of such environments – the more-than-human world. It addresses the whole ecologies of which we are part, on upon which we depend for our very existence. People does not have to mean exclusively human – we might consider other species (trees, birds, mammals etc) as peoples, as some indigenous humans have done, since they constitute their own societies and ways of being in the world. All have as much right to life as each other, it is only human hubris which champions our right to own and exploit everything else as paramount.

The booklet brings together, in a simple way, a set of principles and guides for working based on empathy, common sense, trust and agency. It is centred on establishing and following an ethos – through listening and responding, trusting and being trusted; anticipating consequences and reflecting on what you do. It adds into the mix principles for building trust borrowed from Baroness Onora O’Neill’s 2002 Reith Lectures, as well as the Precautionary Principle, Duty of Care and the Nolan Principles of Public Life. It also includes my own personal values: passion, intensity, intimacy, pleasure, obligation, responsibility, culpability.

The booklet is free to download on bookleteer, or read the online version.

Reciprocally Entangled

This statement of my current thinking on the topics of agency, data and quantum computing was originally presented to the Human Centred Computing research group at the University of Oxford on October 1st 2015. The group, with whom I have been developing a dialogue since Spring 2014, is led by Professor Marina Jirotka and has a particular focus on Responsible Research and Innovation. They are involved in embedding RRI into NQIT – the Networked Quantum Information Technologies Hub based at Oxford. I have made a few changes to the original text inspired by the group’s extremely thoughtful comments and discussion.

Introduction
At the core of all my work and projects over the past 20 years is the theme of agency. By that I mean our ability as humans to act on our own initiative, to make informed decisions and choices. To be willing actors rather than directed subjects in all areas of life. In my experience open and transparent communications are fundamental to such an aspiration, and many of my projects explore ways and means of enabling people to communicate and interact with other people and systems to achieve this.

Looking back, there is a clear trajectory in my work which emphasises that systems should engage people and empower them, not seek to condition their experiences or shape their lives. From my work on the convergence of mobile phones with wireless internet and GIS mapping technologies in the early 2000s which has been described as a kind of proto-social media (Urban Tapestries), to experiments with sensors and platforms for citizen science style pollution mapping (Feral Robots & Snout), as well as experiments in data manifestation as a critique of the quantified self meme (Lifestreams). In my opinion, too often the technologies that are deployed across society are not intended to benefit all, but are contingent on bringing benefit to a privileged few – those who build them and those who commission and own the systems being built.

I believe that human individualities and different people’s idiosyncracies of learning and understanding are crucial social assets that enrich our collective experiences of life. I want to explore how we can design systems that adapt to these values and incorporate their dynamic into their very fabric. I want to find alternatives to the expanding deployment of systems and technologies that shape and manage behaviour by imposing rigid and inflexible decisions or choices. I believe that we need to question and challenge the mindset that sees the efficiency of algorithms and data-driven inference as the pinnacle of how human societies should be run.

One of the ways I think we can begin to revolutionise our relationship to data is by bridging the biological and digital. If we can design ways to utilise the whole human sensorium (not just vision and hearing) for sense-making and interpretation, then I believe that we can make complex information tangible and appreciable in richer and more nuanced ways. This means departing fundamentally from normative data representations on computer screens. It means embodying them in reciprocally interactive engagements that afford us greater use of our highly developed senses – what I have been calling “data manifestation”. This could allow us to experience data in ways that reveal things we have hitherto not considered possible. It may also reveal contingencies and limitations in what kinds of data are being collected – and may lead us to collect different kinds of data that have perhaps been overlooked.

How might we enliven relations between humans and machines so that they can be mutually influential rather than unbalanced in favour of one side or the other? I suspect that the promise of quantum computing, with its multiple states, may offer something along these lines, but only if we, as researchers and designers, have the courage of our imagination to make such a future possible.

Entangled Engagement & Quantum Computing
I have been thinking recently about the nature of entanglement – as far as I can understand it as a lay person not a scientist – and how the highly metaphoric language itself suggests an unintentional or, at least, ambiguous state. If we think about how we use the word ‘entangled’ in everyday situations it is to describe something, or some things, that have become entangled accidentally – without the deliberate decision to do so.

I have titled this statement “reciprocally entangled” because I think that the promise of quantum computing is one we must have agency with and choose to engage with, rather than unwittingly becoming caught within. That we might deliberately choose to enmesh ourselves with a system that, like humans, can be more than a cascade of rules and simple on/off decisions, would be a significant revolution in how we decide to run our societies.

I think that this idea of ‘unwitting entanglement’ characterises many of the fundamental problems we are experiencing with the so-called Big Data revolution, where we have suddenly begun to find ourselves subject to systems that are ruled by inference and not by balanced judgement. My proposition is that just as we might think that our society and civilisation has become enmeshed in a complex set of interlocking inference systems which define people’s lives in ever more intrusive ways, so might we begin to think of quantum computing – and being reciprocally entangled with such a system – as being closer to the kind of complex and consciousness-driven judgement that previously defined our choices and decisions (since, say, the Enlightenment).

More and more, the effects of decisions made by data-driven inference are coming to pervade aspects of our everyday lives. It is not always clear how such systemic decisions are arrived at, but it is undeniable that people are both shaping and having their choices shaped as an affect of the increasing reliance on so-called Big Data systems. A kind of blind self-governance that could so easily tip over into forms of self-censorship, self-privation and self-denial.

Such choices are most visible to us on an everyday level in the recommendations we see in internet shopping (“you’ve bought this and might like that”) and what social media systems select to populate our profile feeds (both adverts and posts by our connections). Their use in electronic financial services is widely known of, but little known about – obscured behind a veil of exclusivity, secrecy and the disparities of wealth and power. The role of such systems in health is also increasing, driven as much by attitudes towards risk and liability in the health insurance industry as by advances in medicine, wellbeing and disease prevention. These opaque applications remain worrying precisely because they flow against the transparencies of fairness and democracy that our society has been implementing over the past few centuries.

But what if we can rethink how we interact with systems as reciprocal engagements? And what if we were to see them as entangled relationships at the same time?

Perception is more than simply seeing
How humans perceive and create meaning is an associative process that is fundamentally different to inference from data. It is an expression of the difference between consciousness and a structured system; and, furthermore, it is more than what is offered by systems that mimic ‘neural nets’. Aesthetics and how we make meaning from artworks gives us a concrete example of how this operates in practice. Aesthetics cannot be taught, but flows from a dynamic interweaving or perhaps an entanglement of our memories and experiences with our physical senses. At each moment of experiencing something in an encounter with an artwork – writing, painting, sculpture, music or performance – we are existing in an entangled moment blending the now with the summation of our conscious sense of self. We are not inferring meaning (as a structured data-driven system might), but actually making meaning from the experience itself.

So-called neuro-aesthetics has sought to find a physical explanation of this process in the chemical reactions in the brain. But so far it has not been able to,

“ Objects are not triggers for internal events in the nervous system; they are opportunities or affordances for our continuing transactions with them. …
Art is experienced in the setting of argument, criticism, and persuasion. This is all compatible, Kant realized, with the fact that there is no way of adjudicating disputes in this area, that there are no decision procedures, no rules, no way of proving who’s right and wrong.”
Alva Noë, How Art Reveals the Limits of Neuroscience, The Chronicle Review

Beyond Visualisation : Embodied Entanglements
What if we can bridge the digital and biological by utilising the whole human sensorium for sense-making and interpretation – going beyond just vision and hearing? What if we could make complex data tangible and appreciable to a range of human senses? Embodied and felt instead of just seen and heard. In turn the experiences could be fed back in to data systems as a new set of parameters that could adjust the nature of systems that use the data. This was the theme of my Creativeworks residency with the Computer Science department at Birkbeck in Autumn 2014. The workshop I devised to help communicate the potential of multisensory expressions of data has been a crucial step in continuing to develop the ideas begun with the Lifestreams collaboration with Philips Research in 2012.

What I hope to do next is to embark on a journey of collaboration and discovery to demonstrate the potential for social change that could be unleashed by developing multisensory interactions with the digital data that is increasingly measuring, being analysed and governing our daily lives. Humans have extraordinary sensory capabilities which are not currently being used in how we encounter data – principally through screens (sight), occasionally sound and, rarely, through haptics (touch). I believe that this leaves us impoverished. By expressing digital data in new forms we could unlock entirely new modalities for recording, sharing and understanding how we live our lives : from experiences of illness and rehabilitation via biosensors to how we make sense of the Big Data that now shape and govern our society.

I hope to explore this theme along a series of trajectories and to demonstrate – to scientists, technologists, designers and policymakers and to the wider public beyond – how we could create transformational ways for people to engage with and make sense of data. I aim to work collaboratively (with old and new partners) to develop projects and experiments that express digital data in different ways that engage human biological senses other than just sight and hearing – such as touch, smell, taste, balance, temperature, proprioception and time etc. I am particularly keen to engage with researchers in the biological and life sciences (and hybrid fields such as computational biology) to create a bridge between how people interact with and make sense of the biological world around us, and with digital systems.

Documenting Traditional Knowledge in Papua New Guinea
Alongside these concerns I am working with Professor James Leach and a community of indigenous people (from Reite village) living a traditional way of life in the jungle in Madang Province, Papua New Guinea. There we are co-developing a simple hybrid digital/physical toolkit for people to self-document local traditional knowledge of plants, customs, design and productions techniques (TK Reite Notebooks). The tools and techniques we are co-designing there are based on my pioneering work since the late 1990s in hybrid digital/physical publishing. It uses the Diffusion eBook format, a unique paper folding method invented in 1999-2000, as well as the bookleteer.com self-publishing platform which was created and launched in 2009. This is another form of what I have called “public authoring” – making it possible for people to communicate things of value in open and shareable ways.

What is clear is that Reite people’s culture doesn’t consider knowledge as a series of static objects – in the Cartesian tradition of Western Knowledge – but as relational. Knowledge is constructed and exists in the relations between humans that hold it, share it and pass it on to future generations. It is always contextual and situational. To me, this establishes a conceptual link with what I have been exploring in my data manifestation work – that how we develop understandings of information and the ways it can be encoded in forms or media is located in the experience of the encounter, and our conscious ability to reweave our experiences in the present with those in our memories of the past.

One of the most striking things about this project is the difference between traditional anthropological ethnography and self-documentation that emerges from its results. What people choose to value and document may not necessarily be intelligible to outsiders, or of any interest. This flows against the mainstream of anthropology and ethnography which seeks to observe, understand and explain a culture to others. I feel that my conception of public authoring is akin to the aims of the originators of Mass Observation, who proposed an “anthropology of ourselves” back in the late 1930s. They thought that it was important for ordinary people to document ordinary life, and developed a framework that encouraged people from all walks of life to record and submit reports on things, customs, events and behaviours which they observed. Mass Observation and public authoring are both creative activities that seek an audience beyond their immediate community, yet at the same time they are the outputs of people attempting to record their own world and values for themselves.

In a similar way, the lifecharms, or data shells, which we created in the Lifestreams project were expressions of data manifested into material form. As such the data itself ceased to be directly readable (as it might be in a graph or chart), but was embodied in the actual form and shape of each shell. No longer intelligible to anyone but the person whose data had been the source of the shell’s growth pattern, the lifecharms signify something without revealing exactly what. As a type of self-documentation this translation of digital data collected from biosensors and life-tracking devices begins to mirror the output of our public authoring notebooks of Reite village : fascinating to outsiders, yet unintelligible if not directly explained by someone within the community that generated them. Open to interpretation, inspirational and allusive, but never didactic. Where knowledge and communication are reciprocally entangled, not inferred.

The trajectory I sketched at the beginning of this statement – linking human agency as the core of many projects I’ve led – now connects all these thoughts on the nature of what kind of future we want to build. Is it to be one where we devise systems to manage our societies that are responsive and dynamically adapt to our interactions with them, or a future where our decisions and choices are increasing defined and shaped by algorithms designed by and for the benefit of an ever more remote elite?