Data Publics

Peter Mörtenböck is Professor of Visual Culture at TU Wien's School of Architecture and Planning, and Professorial Research Fellow at Goldsmiths College, London.

Helge Mooshammer is a cultural theorist based at Goldsmiths College, London and TU Wien.

Data has emerged as a key component that determines how interactions across the world are structured, mediated and represented. This book examines these new data publics and the areas in which they become operative, via analysis of politics, geographies, environments and social media platforms.

By claiming to offer a mechanism to translate every conceivable occurrence into an abstract code that can be endlessly manipulated, digitally processed data has caused conventional reference systems which hinge on our ability to mark points of origin, to rapidly implode. Authors from a range of disciplines provide insights into such a political economy of data capitalism; the political possibilities of techno-logics beyond data appropriation and data refusal; questions of visual, spatial and geographical organization; emergent ways of life and the environments that sustain them; and the current challenges of data publics, which is explored via case studies of three of the most influential platforms in the social media economy today: Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp.

Data Publics will be of great interest to academics and students in the fields of computer science, philosophy, sociology, media and communication studies, architecture, visual culture, art and design, and urban and cultural studies.

Data has emerged as a key component that determines how interactions across the world are structured, mediated and represented. This book examines these new data publics and the areas in which they become operative, via analysis of politics, geographies, environments and social media platforms.

Introduction ; Section One: Politics ; 1. In Praise of Plasticity ; 2. Data Capitalism, Sociogenic Prediction and Recursive Indeterminacies ; 3. Emotariat Accelerationism and the Republic of Data ; Section Two: Environments ; 4. Unearthly Domain: the enigmatic data publics of satellites ; 5. Sensing Air and Creaturing Data ; 6. Offsite: data, materiality, landscape, compression ; 7. Fracking Sociality: architecture, real estate and the internet's new urbanism ; Section Three: Platforms ; 8. City-Making in the Age of Platforms ; 9. The Aesthetic Society ; 10. Publics or Post-Publics? Contemporary expression after the mobile Phone