Data intimacies is an artistic research project exploring how emergent automation technologies permeate further and further into our private and intimate lives. Companion AI chatbots, therapists, smart home systems and new forms of disembodied sex work are now widely accessible through a fresh wave of startups. While claiming to make our lives easier and happier, the companies behind these services use manipulative techniques to compete with each other for user loyalty in what Tristan Harris has described as an arms race to weaponize intimacy
Through artistic research methods the project interrogates how these phenomena have grown so quickly in capacity and popularity. Artworks, practical testing and reflective writing speculate on possible tactics to counteract soft coercion and on the not-so-distant future of data intimacies.

Amy Boulton is an artist and inter-dependent researcher from the UK, based in Gothenburg Sweden and currently in residence at Viborg Kunsthal. Her practice puts feminist critiques of work, technology and urbanism into practice, creating diverse and playful works often designed to be experienced in online or public spaces. With a firm belief in the need to connect art to other disciplines, she often collaborates with others who have backgrounds in architecture, urban planning, programming, interaction, social and game design.

https://amyboulton.info/Data-Intimacies

Conspiracy theories are part and parcel of today's mediatized cultural and political landscape, yet the dominant way to think and talk about these alternative notions of reality and their adherents is in pathological ways: they are irrational, ludicrous and dangerous and need to be removed from the public sphere. However, this pervasive stigmatization does not help to better understand the distrust underlying these ideas, nor their specific cultural manifestations. Instead, it fuels societal polarization. In this talk, I will discuss current academic analyses about conspiracy theories, and present my own alternative (digital) ethnographic research program of this phenomenon.

Jaron Haramban is Assistant Professor of Media, Truth Politics and Digitalization, at the Sociology Department, University of Amsterdam. **He has written extensively on the topics of conspiracy theories, but with a focus on the processes behind generation of truth as well as the rationale of the communities associated with conspiracy theories. He has authored the book Contemporary Conspiracy Culture: Truth and Knowledge in an Era of Epistemic Instability

Nate Tkacz will present some of his work-in-progress on how to study platform decline and platform migration

Nate Tkacz is a Professor of Digital Media and Culture. His broad interest is in understanding how digital technologies produce or (re)shape culture and society. He has approached this interest in a number of ways, for example, through a study of how digital networks change the conditions of knowledge production (through studies of Wikipedia or dashboard interfaces), or through studies of how apps transform our relationship to money and finance (banking apps), or governance and health (covid apps). His research aims to combine critical and technical understandings of media with creative methodological approaches.

This half-day symposium will be an interdisciplinary conversation about preservation and processing of data, bodies and food. Taking as its framework research and curatorial project Fermenting Data fermentingdata.net , the symposium will present artistic and curatorial approaches to working with data and it will ask how speculation and thinking data otherwise can support developing new epistemological approaches to study of data while also offering new tools and methods for data practices.

More information and schedule: https://cc.au.dk/en/news-and-events/events/event/artikel/critical-data-studies-fermenting-data/

Please sign up before Wednesday 23rd June at 8:00 AM (CET) -

https://fermentingdata.net/

Skagen Institute's annual Transgressive Methods Conference, along with a PhD course/writing retreat