Listening in the Afterlife of Data: Aesthetics, Pragmatics, and Incommunication
David Cecchetto, (Duke University Press, 2022)
In Listening in the Afterlife of Data, David Cecchetto theorizes sound, communication, and data by analyzing them in the contexts of the practical workings of specific technologies, situations, and artworks. In a time he calls the afterlife of data鈥攖he cultural context in which data鈥檚 hegemony persists even in the absence of any belief in its validity鈥擟ecchetto shows how data is repositioned as the latest in a long line of concepts that are at once constitutive of communication and suggestive of its limits. Cecchetto points to the failures and excesses of communication by focusing on the power of listening鈥攚hether through wearable technology, internet-based artwork, or the ways in which computers process sound鈥攖o pragmatically comprehend the representational excesses that data produces. Writing at a cultural moment in which data has never been more ubiquitous or less convincing, Cecchetto elucidates the paradoxes that are constitutive of computation and communication more broadly, demonstrating that data is never quite what it seems.
Year of Publication: 2022David Cecchetto