Prompts for Big Data

Calming Surveillant Anxiety
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Crawford asks at the end of her article “how might we find a radical potential in the surveillant anxieities of the big data era?” In this spirit, what might such a radical artistic response be? If surveillant anxiety is a fear that our data may reveal too much and/or also misrepresent us, what are some strategies to disable and/or disarm our personal big data profiles?

Challenging the Big Data Fallacy
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A prevailing problem with big data is that some presume that having enough data is the same as having meaning from the data. Yet data must be interepreted to produce meaning. Imagine any kind of artistic object (game, installation, browser extension, performance, etc) that demonstrates the fallacy that more data necessarily equals more meaning.
What Should Be Forgotten?
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A salient feature of big data is that it remembers everything. Going from the premise that some things are better forgotten, devise a performance/video/story/interaction that addresses this quesiton of forgetting. What is important to forget? What problems occur when that type of control is lost over oneself? Black Mirror looked at how it affects interpersonal relationships and citizen-government surveillance relationships…what are some other aspects of life that would/could be negatively impacted by a loss of forgetting.

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