Språkvetenskapliga fakulteten, LILAe

Kalendarium

Abstract: Datamediation denotes both how data is mediated through digital technologies and how data functions as itself a form of mediation. My concern with datamediation is an attempt to think through how the almost ubiquitous entity called “data” operates in almost every aspect of human and nonhuman life and nonlife in the 21st century. In this talk, I take up Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour, to consider the film’s cinematic datamediation of the affectivity of surveillance and exposure. Among the questions that Citizenfour asks is one I will focus on today: “What does it feel like to know you’re under surveillance?” My broad aim in thinking about the affectivity of surveillance is to shift discussion about national security issues away from questions of precisely what information is under surveillance and towards questions of how surveillance functions to control, generate, and mobilize individual and collective affectivity, particularly in relation to our socially networked media devices and practices.