151. Soft Data and Common Wares with Afroditi Psarra and Audrey Desjardins

Original Drawing by Tori Haynes

Today we are joined by Afroditi Psarra and Audrey Desjardins who talk about building alternative technologies that respond to and critique the world of data, and their project “Soft Data and Common Wares”.

Timestamp Outline 

1:45 Opening discussion about why Psarra and Desjardins are collaborating; what was the motivation that brought you together?
Voices and Voids project: reclaiming voices in data, performance and data, and the exploration on how many ways the data can be presented to understand it differently.

4:26 What is soft data? What is hard data?
Discussion about bias in data; “as soon as it’s human, it’s soft data” AD
Big data = Big money, Soft data = ?

7:44 The Psychoanalytic Concept of Jouissance and the Kindling Hypothesis – Jacques Lacan
“Even though data is considered as something that is characterized by precision, objectivity, perfection, and very discrete numbers, we are interested in creating artifacts and technologies that embodies the idea that the data we collect and examine can be messy, plural, subjective, and local.” AP

10:48    How does this translate into the commons? The cultural common way?
Theory and material, and the question of how that can be a conversation for more people? The idea of the commons as an alternative to the “datatotalitating universe”
The body (AP) and the home (AD)

14:24    Discussion he relationship between big data and engagement of experience, body, common spaces, and interactivity as foil to regime of big data through looking at the collaboration
The beach in Greece as a site of common wares and the collaboration that took place there; the map and conversations at the beach
The setting and the beach was needed to come up with new definitions, new discoveries, new ways to interpret data, and that was more of the context than the pre-text

19:10    The three major areas of work:
1. Gender and the body
2. Earth, space, and body
3. Invisible data infrastructures

23:59    Using the mistranslations of the beach conversation as sights for continuing the conversation for the zine
Did the recording pick up background sounds? Its role as a site for soft data? What is the relationship between background sounds, mistranslation, and the whole project?

26:36    Earth, Space, and Body
The recording creating illusionary space – AP
Hearing the background noise when asking from voice assistants that gives background text
Vignette of background noises compiled
Wanting to use the background noise as the project because the machine deemed it as unimportant – AD

30:53    Gender and the Body – What is your construction of the body in this project?
The cyborg body in the gendered body dictated by algorithms
The non-binary body
Design Trouble – A Symposium on the Ordinary Ethics of World-Building
Sonic Technologies of a Queer Breakup – Brian Kinnee, Daniela K. Roser, Audrey Desjardins

41:14    What do you think about AI and ChatGPT in this context?
AI and ChatGPT vs. Alexa?

46:16    Linking interest in producing the commons/common space among people and defense of private and intellectual property?
Is ChatGPT creating a commons by using all these sources?
Where is the data coming from?
What is the data they are being trained on? What are the processes of consent and active engagement by the creators of the original data in the production of the algorithms? 

52:45    “I hope in a sense, the physicality of architecture can function along in  those registers” VP