Cecilia Wee and Dani Admiss

CO-BUILDING WORLDS: DATA-DISCOURSES AND OTHER STORIES

_#Data-Capitalism; #Curating; #Collaborative-storytelling; #Data-Discourse. This performance-based research and praxis presentation presents the curatorial project ‘PostHuman Unit for NeuroCapitalism’ (PHUNC), a research and design unit engaged in co-creating new visions of post-consumer and postproducer subjectivities through community-based neuro and data-capitalist research. Against a backdrop of new neuros (Pykett) and largescale technoscientific information structures forming super-advanced capitalism’s new frontiers for growth (Neidich), PHUNC proposes that the challenge for those working in arts, technology and social change today is to design interventional acts of ‘radical sensing’ that expand on ‘representational forms that enable articulations of change’ (Rossiter) embracing an experimental process of curating as world-building, a way of taking on personal entanglement and global complexity (Haraway) in response to the normative economic and epistemic goals outlined by data capitalism.

Over a period of two months, the curators collated reports from a worldwide network of PHUNC researchers working in arts and cultural contexts, as well within think-tanks, policy-based organisations and higher education. They asked PHUNC researchers to reflect on how data works in relation to local agency, the identities produced through globalised work and consumption, and the negotiations materialising for people operating in opposition to dominant frameworks of data-discourses within the Capitalocene (Moore). This highly specific evidence forms the basis of a collaborative performative narrative to be presented to the forum audience: emerging worldviews from a variegated set of lived geographic and socio-economic realities under the umbrella of ‘data capitalism’. Bookending the presentation, the curators discuss evolving methods to working with complex, contradictory and chaotic subject matters in the arts and analyse this specific technique of collaborative storytelling.