Kris Paulsen and Brian Michael Murphy (Dean, Bennington College) have just published Afterlives of Data, a special issue of Media-N. The issue addresses the ways that the material conditions of data and art are shifting, and how thinkers, artists, and scholars can offer crucial scaffolding for understanding how we arrived here. The contributors present prehistories of data models we take for granted and provide historical contexts that clarify what is new and what is not, helping us to see where we might be headed. NFTs, DNA data, the sensuous traces of e-waste, facial recognition software trained on marginalized subjects, and the institutionalized processes of dispossessing human subjects from their colonial contexts all present ways in which data comes to have an afterlife that haunts our present and potential futures.

Click here to view the special issue of Media N.