[ecrea] Announcement of Workshop: data and technics

DATA AND TECHNICS WORKSHOP
APRIL 24-25, 2014

Speakers: Francesca Bria, Elena Esposito, Bernard Geoghegan, Scott Lash,
Maurizio Lazzarato, Thomas Macho, Bernard Stiegler.

The workshop is public but space is limited, please register with
(paul.feigelfeld /at/ leuphana.de)

The workshop addresses Technics and Data each in its broadest sense, as
intertwined and analytically separated. Technics conjures the tripartite
scheme in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, in which techne is juxtaposed, to
on the one hand praxis, and on the other, episteme, or theory. But what sort
of logic is at stake in today’s technological, even ‘bio-political’
societies? Is the episteme of science, who seemed to have been incorporated
into a logic of representation, taken over by a engineering or technics type
logic of performativity? What would ‘data’ be in such a framework, and how
is it, if it is, different from ‘facts’? Does science and social science
deal with facts, while data is more an engineering or technical entity? The
origins of data or les données would seem to stand in connection to the
given (donnée) or the gift (don). Social scientists and scientists search
for and get data. In the age of GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple)
and Prism, people not only give, but also leave data, as traces or data
footprints. Does data make us need rethink the relationship between the
universal and the particular? If the origins of the particular are in the
gift, or le don, then Ancients may have encountered particulars as
substances, moderns as facts and contemporaries as data itself? If
Aristotle’s categories are the predicates of substances, then what are the
categories, how are we going to categorize in an age of data and metadata?
What kind of communications and systems are at stake? Can there be a
technics (and data) beyond systems?

Organized by: Scott Lash, Yuk Hui, Götz Bachmann, Paul Feigelfeld



24 April (Thursday)

Noon: Arrival in Lüneburg
>From 12:00 pm Coffee and Sandwiches

1.15 - 2PM Welcome, Concept Note
Yuk Hui, Scott Lash, Götz Bachmann

2 - 4 pm Panel 1: Data Infrastructures
Data, as a cycle of the given, facts and machine mediated information, is
fueled by a rapid development of infrastructures. In social media, for
example, users materialize thoughts, monologues, conversations and
friendships. Mobile phones, digital cameras, RFID systems and sensors
detect, record and transmit data, based on software infrastructures.
Algorithms in Google's and Facebook's server farms harvest data with
exactitude and granularity. How can we understand these infrastructures?
What is the infra-, and what is the -structure?

Bernard Stiegler
Florian Sprenger
Responses: Erich Hörl


4.30 - 6.30 Panel 2: Data Temporality
Data is memory. As Plato famously wrote, storage is also forgetting. At
stake is a third term, too: Imagination. Imagination is a form of
protention, supplementing by different forms of retentions, and it can lead
us into. What consequences does this excess of memory and forgetting, of
protention and retention, and of imagination and synthesis lead us into?

Elena Esposito
Thomas Macho
Responses: Marcus Burkhardt


25 April (Friday)

10 - 11:00 am Recap

11:00 am - 13:00 Panel 3: Technics
If we follow the concept of technics into our times, we need to abandon the
reduction of technics to instrumental reasons in Aristotle’s tripartite
scheme. We need to place technics within an understanding of data. At the
same time, data as seen from a perspective of technics would have to focus
on the processes of bringing something forth to presence, moving beyond
notions of taxonomies and schemas.

Scott Lash
Bernard Geoghegan
Responses: Christina Vagt


14:00 - 16:00 Panel 4: Data Politics
As data is rapidly becoming one of our most precious commodities, new forms
of properties and value arise. How can we analyse our data-driven political
economy? At the same time, governmentality becomes computer aided-data
processing, and power takes algorithmic form. “Open data” promises
alternatives, but might well produce “open washing”. What kind of
redistribution of power is desirable?

Maurizio Lazzarato
Francesca Bria
Responses: Armin Beverungen

16:30 - 17:00 Wrap up.


________________________________________

Dr. Florian Sprenger

Digital Cultures Research Lab
Leuphana Universität Lüneburg
Scharnhorststraße 1
21335 Lüneburg

(florian.sprenger /at/ leuphana.de)

http://www.floriansprenger.com
http://www.flickr.com/farbwahl






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