Author Archives: Yuliya Grinberg

I am a PhD candidate in the department of anthropology at Columbia University. My work examines the expansion of self-tracking and the social impact of personal data increasingly generated by mobile applications and sensor technology. I am particularly interested in data aesthetics and the relationship between data and embodiment.
Photograph of clear vials labeled "erase" and "replace" it says "Be invisible" above them.

The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction: A Conversation with Heather Dewey-Hagborg

Walter Benjamin’s well-known piece the “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” has long been a canonical essay on the role art plays in the age of automation. Benjamin saw art both as fueled and altered by mechanization. In a conversation with artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg, a partial transcript of which follows below, the role of art in the age of digital reproduction, to paraphrase Benjamin, emerged as a critical theme. Heather’s work, which spans over a decade, is a complex meditation on the contemporary experience of widening digitization. Her work Stranger Visions is perhaps the best known: a project where she reconstructs faces from DNA left on refuse she’s found on the street – a chewed up piece of gum, a stray piece of hair, a lip stain on a glass – into voluptuous, three dimensional portraits. During our conversation, we talked about the creative and the intellectual (read more...)

Yellow capital letters on a black background, "The Human Face of Big Data," above a blue, digitized face of a child in 3/4 profile view, with a larger silhouette of a similar face in light grey superimposed.

Is Data Singular or Plural?

“Is Data Singular or Plural?” I googled as I sat down to write this post. In my dissertation on the Quantified Self movement and the types of subjects produced by the collection of personal data, I had all but taken for granted that the word ‘data’ has become a singular noun. “Data is” announce countless articles and industry conference sessions putting forth definitions of personal data as a shadow or footprint, digital double or virtual copy. My advisor patiently suggested that I check my grammar. Turns out my mistake, at least, was not singular. Derived from the Latin dare, meaning “the givens,” grammar and history instruct us that ‘data’ is the plural form of the singular ‘datum.’ Alexander Galloway has helpfully noted that the word’s original plural sense can still be read in the French translation of data as “les données.” In recent years, however, the proper usage of the word has become a topic of some debate as data has been increasingly employed as a singular noun. What can this shift towards the singularity of data tell us of the operation of personal data in popular thought? (read more...)

Data Visualizations: The Vitruvian Man, Open Data, and Body Real-Estate

How does data look? The answer to this question is often seen as a matter of Data Visualization, a new field increasingly tasked with the role of imaging and imagining data. As a sign of the times, Strata + Hadoop World, the central conference of data professionals, just hosted its first Data Visualization conference in California. With growing urgency the central issue in this field mirror those that had afflicted design before it: where to draw the line between art and science, fact and fiction, form and function. Seeing data, however, is not simply about the skillful manipulation of statistics into visual form. The way data is represented is necessarily tied up with the way and by whom it is presented. Therefore, to ask how data appears is to think about the broader politics of representation, that is the socio-cultural framework that guides how we are invited to view data, how we expect data to look like, function, and act. (read more...)

Destination: You

On a recent trip to California I took the train down to San Jose to visit the Tech Museum of Innovation where a new exhibit focused on wearable technology and data—Body Metrics—had just been unveiled. I study the proliferation of digital self-tracking, a phenomenon made increasingly widespread by the popularity of sensor technology and wearable devices (think Apple Watch, Fitbit wristbands, or OMsignal shirts) that generate data about one’s self. In my research I pay particular attention to the way these new technologies of knowledge are shifting the way we think about and view our bodies so I was keen to see the way the museum expressed the relationship between data and bodies. My visit would become haunted, however, by another display of the body—the Body Worlds exhibit—that I had seen months earlier in New York City. Considered alongside one another, the two exhibits say a lot about the way we commonly conceptualize personal data. (read more...)