DATA Browser
The DATA browser book series explores new thinking and practice at the intersection of contemporary art, digital culture and politics. The series takes theory or criticism not as a fixed set of tools or practices, but rather as an evolving chain of ideas that recognise the conditions of their own making. The term "browser" is useful in pointing to the framing device through which data is delivered over information networks and processed by algorithms. Whereas a conventional understanding of browsing suggests surface readings and cursory engagement with the material, the series celebrates the potential of browsing for dynamic rearrangement and interpretation of existing material into new configurations that are open to reinvention. Combining an active verb and noun in the title as a stylistic device, each book includes contributions from established and emerging academics in conventional written forms as well as visual and/or experimental modes.
DATA browser books are open access, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution By Attribution Share Alike License. Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy their work so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under the same or similar license. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Books are developed through a peer-review process, and are freely available for download (PDF) as well as for sale through book stores or online (Print and ePUB).
Developed by series editors Geoff Cox and Joasia Krysa, DATA browser was established in 2004 and until 2017 published by Autonomedia, and supported by Arts Council England, Aarhus University and University of Plymouth. With support from the Exhibition Research Lab, Liverpool John Moores University, it is now published by Open Humanities Press.
Series Titles
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The interaction between culture and economy was famously explored by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer by the term ‘Kulturindustrie’ (The Culture Industry) to describe the production of mass culture and power relations between capitalist producers and mass consumers. Their account is a bleak one, but one that appears to hold continuing relevance, despite being written in 1944. Today, the pervasiveness of network technologies has contributed to the further erosion of the rigid boundaries between high art, mass culture and the economy, resulting in new kinds of cultural production charged with contradictions. On the one hand, the culture industry appears to ... -
Social change does not simply result from resistance to the existing set of conditions but from adapting and transforming the technical apparatus itself. Walter Benjamin in his essay ‘The Author as Producer’, written in 1934, recommends that the ‘cultural producer’ intervene in the production process in the manner of an engineer. The term ‘engineer’ is to be taken broadly to refer to technical and cultural activity, through the application of knowledge for the management, control and use of power. To act as an engineer in this sense, is to use power productively to bring about change and for public utility. ... -
The site of curatorial production has been expanded to include the space of the Internet and the focus of curatorial attention has been extended from the object to processes to dynamic network systems. As a result, curatorial work has become more widely distributed between multiple agents, including technological networks and software. This upgraded ‘operating system’ of art presents new possibilities of online curating that is collective and distributed – even to the extreme of a self-organising system that curates itself. The curator is part of this entire system but not central to it. The subtitle of the book makes reference ... -
‘Today we are facing extreme and most dangerous developments in the thought of security. In the course of a gradual neutralisation of politics and the progressive surrender of traditional tasks of the state, security imposes itself as the basic principle of state activity. What used to be one among several decisive measures of public administration until the first half of the twentieth century, now becomes the sole criterion of political legitimation. The thought of security entails an essential risk. A state which has security as its sole task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be ... -
The book explores some of the interconnections between art, activism and the business concept of disruptive innovation. With a backdrop of the crisis of financial capitalism, austerity cuts in the cultural sphere, the idea is to focus on potential art strategies in relation to a broken economy. In a perverse way, we ask whether this presents new opportunities for cultural producers to achieve more autonomy over their production process? If it is indeed possible or desirable, what alternative business models emerge? The book is concerned broadly with business as (artistic) material for reinvention, including critical writing and examples of art/activist ... -
This collection brings together artists, curators, programmers, theorists and heavy internet browsers whose practices make critical intervention into the broad concept of execution. It draws attention to their political strategies, asking: who and what is involved with those practices, and for whom or what are these practices performed, and how? From the contestable politics of emoji modifier mechanisms and micro-temporalities of computational processes to genomic exploitation and the curating of digital content, the chapters account for gendered, racialised, spatial, violent, erotic, artistic and other embedded forms of execution. Together they highlight a range of ways in which execution emerges and ... -
This book explores how cultural practitioners and institutions perceive their role in the post-truth era, by repositioning their work in relation to the notion of the “public”. The book addresses the multiple challenges posed for artists, curators and cultural activists by the conditions of post-factuality: Do cultural institutions have the practical means and the ethical authority to fight against the proliferation of “alternative facts” in politics, as well as within all aspects of our lives? What narratives of dissent are cultural practitioners developing, and how do they choose to communicate them? Could new media technologies still be considered as instruments ... -
3D computation has historically co-evolved with Modern technosciences, and aligned with the regimes of optimisation, normalisation and hegemonic world order. The legacies and projections of industrial development leave traces of that imaginary and tell the stories of a lively tension between “the probable” and “the possible”. Defined as the techniques for measuring volumes, volumetrics all too easily (re)produce and accentuate the probable, and this process is intensified within the technocratic realm of contemporary hyper-computation. The ubiquity of efficient operations is deeply damaging in the way it gradually depletes the world of all possibility for engagement, interporousness and lively potential. Volumetric ...
