The seminar will build on previous investigations on the topic of more than-human as witness and memorial of persisting, structural violence. Within this frame, the question of how digital tools and products contribute to this process of writing memory and narratives in the natural and built environment remains crucial.

In the Summer semester, we develop this topic further, and in particular, we’ll explore how digital technology challenges the preservation of data and memory, and of data as memory.

Digital cartographies like Google Earth maps are emblematic cases. Apparent neutral, open access representations of lands and territories, these topographies rather offer transitory, manipulated, vertical, top-down access to a landscape’s visualization that responds to imperialistic agendas, with repercussions on the mode of remembering places and storing, or erasing traces of them.

Within this frame, we’ll focus on the concept of ‘data witnessing’, which refers to how situations can be accounted for and responded to with data (Gray, 2019). Data is defined as “fact, information”. The etymology of this term is datum in Latin, which means “something given.” As philosopher Yuk Hui puts it, if data are objects given, what gives them? Furthermore, analog and digital data are elements far from being objective. The methods, tools, parameters, and conditions of collecting them determine their nature. In addition, data need to be interpreted to signify a process that opens up another set of crucial questions

On the one side, the seminar aims to reflect upon how data, e.g. environmental, human, and digital data, bear witness to macro-dynamics, e.g. ecocides, urbicides, climate catastrophes, and so on. Furthermore, it explores how data and digital tools are interpreted by humans and machines. Used to explain and visualize phenomena, they can produce evidence and narratives for accountability, and thus memory.

On the other side, we’ll observe the opportunities, and also the limits and contradictions of digital devices, archives, and platforms (e.g. Google Earth maps, Copernicus, Global Forest Watch, and so on), in producing, elaborating, preserving and also erasing the information they collect and display, and the direct relationship between media/technologies and the narrative they convey.

Through texts by scholars from different disciplines and artists’ works as case studies, the seminar aims to raise reflections upon these questions, and others emerging from collective discussions. Furthermore, students are invited to present their own case studies that can enrich the perspectives proposed.

During the seminar, the group will participate in activities, such as visits to exhibitions and encounters with artists and researchers.

The outcome of the seminar is a written essay revolving around the investigation of one case study chosen by the student.

Gray, J. (2019), Data witnessing: attending to injustice with data in Amnesty International’s Decoders project, Information, Communication & Society, 22:7, 971-991, DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2019.1573915

Hui, Y. (2012), What is a Digital Object?. Metaphilosophy, 43: 380-395. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9973.2012.01761.