As pattern-seeking creatures, we look out to the objective world to make sense of our environment. In the age of datafication, the received wisdom is that the process has been reversed: corporations look into the subjective world of people's data patterns in order to surveil and anticipate. This much is true, but as this 'pattern-breaking' collection shows, much more happens besides. From the aesthetic to the temporal and from the cultural to the biopolitical, there is a fast-paced evolutionary struggle taking place for the perpetuation of the aeonic patterns of life against the growingly powerful machine-based intelligence of computation. Big Data: A New Medium? is the most important and encompassing analysis yet on the struggle for the 'soul' of human creativity, diversity and autonomy.
Robert Hassan, University of Melbourne, Australia
This is a breath-taking and kaleidoscopic series of reflections on one of the most important phenomena of our age. It tells the compelling story of its subject's quest to anticipate and harness the individual and collective unconscious and is by turns surprising, complex, thought provoking, dizzying and mind-blowing ... just like Big Data itself.
Steve Dixon, President of LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore
As the control of data surpasses the regulation of populations, new modes of government emerge: as well as stripping the earth of its resources we are also stripping our lives of the data they produce. At the same time, new forms of mutant expression are emerging that offer alternative modes of life because, as this volume makes strikingly evident, patterns are always more than they seem. Infinite processes sit buried within finite algorithms. Figuring out the relationship between data mining and its various forms of expression is an urgent task, one that the contributors to this volume take on with a critical intent that steers them away from platitudes and toward inventive insights for our age of control.
Iain MacKenzie, University of Kent, UK
This multidisciplinary volume is perfectly timed to help us consider our increasing immersion in data and its insidious integration with our current experience. Lushetich and the writers she collects in this volume help us rethink our relationship with data in a new way, focusing on its potential as a medium by which to reconsider the phenomena of our 21st century culture and how it affects our fundamental sense of being in the world.
Kevin LaGrandeur, New York Institute of Technology, USA
This mind-opening book cultivates an aesthetic appreciation for, even empathy with, the creative capacities of informational patterning. Certainly these authors critique the crude deployment of big data for profit and power. But more strikingly, they value seemingly nonhuman forms of perception and thought that liberate the human to surf within populations of patterned being.
Laura Marks, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada
This timely and lively collection offers a broadening of the understanding of big data, drawing on the arts, humanities and social sciences to put big data in a bigger picture.
Matthew Fuller, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK
