Project Fermenting Data is a part of conference Data Life co-organized by INTERSECT research group, DATA LOSS project, DATA STORIES project, The Centre for Culture and Technology, and The Aesthetics of Bio-Machines, and takes place in Copenhagen University on the 5 November.  Presentation titled "Fermenting Data, or what does it mean for data to get a life? (experiments in Curating Data)" speculates on what it means for data "to get a life," based on workshops developed by Magdalena Tyzlik-Carver with Lozana Rossenova and Lukas Fuchsgruber in 20222 and 2023. The project Fermenting Data reimagines data as a shared, accessible resource, exploring non-extractive, symbiotic ways of processing data inspired by fermentation's transformative properties and challenging conventional data practices.

From the abstract:

In a popular parlance, addressing someone to ‘get a life’ is an expression of contempt for their lack of experience of the real world, and it defines a person as one without friends, hobbies, and concentrated on mundane activities mostly defined by job obligations. In this paper we speculate on what it means for data ‘to get a life’, by introducing our collaborative curatorial and research project Fermenting Data which brings together practices of fermentation and data processing.

Fermenting Data initiated in 2020, aims to engage in sensing and sense-making with data and fermentation acting as both a metaphor and material process to speculatively engage with data. The idea to mix these two seemingly unrelated practices and processes, starts from a desire to reclaim data as common practice that is available and accessible as broadly as possible, and to engage artistic and curatorial rigour through speculative methods in order to open up to opportunities for exploration and research that are afforded by practice-based methodologies. This is why the project is both a curatorial and research task, carried out through workshops, public exhibitions, and use of free, collaborative software such as Wikibase and its linked open data database.

If curators’ care for objects is also about making them accessible to different publics, our intention here is to think with the project of making data public as a form of ‘getting a life’. We see this as an epistemological quest about knowledge and how it is made with data, who is involved and at what stage. Ubiquity of data does not necessarily translate into accessibility. Here issues are many and not only involving making data open, promoting skills, developing ethics of data use and re-use, and making data infrastructures public, etc. Rather they start with basic questions about data and what they are: who is involved in generating data, why do we need so much of it, and how are they part of knowledge making? Using a speculative prompt that asks: what if data could be fermented? introduces a playful entry into the data processing world for anyone, expert or not, yet intrigued by the vision of fermenting data. While we translate the idiom of getting a life as data becoming social and public, we understand this process in an expanded way that sees the social in more-than-human terms. Inspired by the work that bacteria and enzymes do during fermentation we insist on making information and data tangible and we challenge ourselves with the question: how do we learn from life- transforming properties of bacteria that created this world, and how can we bring this knowledge back into data processing to replace extractive practices of processing data with those based on symbiosis and self-maintenance?

To read more about the conference or the other contributions, visit conference website here.
To read about Fermenting Data project, visit the project's website.