(Un)real Data – Real Effects

27 February 2024
Kino Šiška
Trg prekomorskih brigad 3, Ljubljana

Is it possible to create specific real-world outcomes by modifying our data streams? Can we use the ambiguity inherent in data systems to manipulate them? When we base automated decision-making on data, are we basing the decisions on fact or fiction?

The conference (Un)real Data – Real Effects explores how the ambiguous quality of data can become a tool to influence real-world outcomes. The shift to a data-driven society has made automated data collection an intrinsic component of most technologies and devices. This means that most of our interactions with technology today generate data that in turn influences our world: our devices tell us how well we have slept, predict where our favourite restaurants will be and what products we will like. But data systems also shape the news we read, the borders we are allowed to cross, the jobs we can successfully apply for.

(Un)real Data – Real Effects brings together artists and thinkers who investigate how producing specific data can become a means to strategically intervene into a data-driven system. How can the ambiguous quality of data be used not to describe the world but instead to strategically produce certain data and thereby provoke specific outcomes?

Through talks, discussions, performances, a lecture and a live event where people compete against each other using text-to-image software, artists and thinkers assess what possibilities for resistance remain when opting out of data streams is no longer an option.