Re/Embodied Data: Ambiguities of Knowing

This publication addresses the relationship between quantifiable and experiential knowledge and uses three transdisciplinary dialogues between the arts and sciences to ask how these differences can be articulated and made productive.

We live in times of comprehensive datafication. Digital technologies allow ever more aspects of our lives and the planet to be measured and analyzed. This creates new ways of knowing and doing. All too often however, this development leads to a systematic devaluation of forms of knowing that cannot be quantified and processed digitally. Digital data and lived worlds, technical measurements and embodied experiences are based on fundamentally different ways of perceiving the world. This publication addresses the relationship between quantifiable and experiential knowledge and uses three transdisciplinary dialogues between the arts and sciences to ask how these differences can be articulated and made productive.

This book documents and elaborates upon a one-day conference held under the same title at the Berlin University of the Arts, the Technische Universität Berlin in collaboration with the Zurich University of the Arts in June 2024. As a practical attempt to make productive the ambiguities of knowing based on dis/embodied experience, three pairs of researchers/artists, who collaborated over an extended period of time in order to share different perspectives on their common subject and expand on the resulting ambiguities in an open discussion were brought together. The texts assembled here are the introductory statements of each of the contributors, as well as condensed, edited versions of discussions that were triggered by them.

With contributions from: Sénamé Koffi Agbodjinou, Johannes Fritz, Ulrich Ott, Anani Dodji Sanouvi, Felix Stalder, Michelle Christensen, Cornelia Sollfrank and Florian Conradi. Moderations: i.a. Ines Weigand, Shusha Niederberger.