Planetary Data Infrastructures is a convergence (panel) that explores expanded engagements with networked infrastructures (intimate, concrete and speculative) that help foster more response-able, aesthetic, cooperative, and sustainable planetary relations.
Invited contributions will be presented at the ‘Making and doing transformations’, (EASST) –4Sweb 2024 conference in Amsterdam on 16-19 July 2024. We invite conventional and experimental formats in presentation abstracts (spoken word, performance, social sculpture, fictocriticism, poetry… More info below and here
Ruins and Fragility Planetary Data Infrastructures – Image Nancy Mauro-Flude
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- Planetary Data Infrastructures Abstracts due: 12 February 2024 (info here)
- Invited presentations early bird registration: 25 March – 3 June 2024
- Making and doing transformations, Amsterdam: 16-19 July 2024
Planetary Data Infrastructures
Conveners Estrid Sørensen (Ruhr-Universität Bochum)
Nancy Mauro-Flude (RMIT University)
Stefan Laser (Ruhr-University Bochum)
Steven Jackson (Cornell University)
STS scholarship has extensively studied how data infrastructures have both epistemic and social as well as material components. Recently, attention has been extended to understanding data infrastructures as caught up with and increasingly forming the core biological, chemical, and physical processes that shape and define human and more-than-human lives on earth. These processes are moreover entangled in more mediate planetary relations: historical and colonial practices and discourses of growth and progress (Hogan 2015), of thin hope solutionism (Jackson 2023), critiquing growth paradigms of computing, encouraging embedded, intimate processual, visceral systems (Mauro-Flude 2021), as well as atomised ownership and governance structures (Sørensen & Laser 2023).
STS and related scholars have been particularly creative in proposing
concepts that intervene into harmful planetary relations: care and
bodily relations (Mol 2008; Puig de la Bellacasa 2017 ); broken worlds,
ruins and fragility (e.g. Papadopoulos et al 2023 ; Jackson 2014);
half-built assemblages (Burrell 2020 ), monsters, ghosts and friction
(Tsing et al 2017 ), and many more.
With the notion of “planetary data infrastructures” we aim to
- enrich STS insights into data infrastructures as planetary by thinking across empirical studies,
- expand STS’s conceptual resources for
understanding data infrastructures as planetary (including through new
borrowings and partnerships beyond STS), and particularly - inquire into engagements with data infrastructures, both concrete and
speculative, that might help us think and act toward more response-able, creative and sustainable planetary relations.
In order to envision planetary data infrastructures in new ways,
experimenting with different material practices is necessary alongside
established epistemic formats. The Panel thus combines academic paper
presentations with experimental formats such as material hands-on server
experiences, virtual reality applications, game renderings, artistic and
bodily performances etc.
We invite contributions that address the above and related topics. *For inquires, do not hesitate to contact @estrid@assemblag.es