‘Reality Harvester: Nature after Data after Nature’: edited by Amy Boulton, Lisa Trogen Devgun, Jacob Broms Engblom and Benjamin Gerdes. published by Skogen.
Reality Harvester is a monument erected for a research project conducted under a pandemic in a world with increasingly torn map territory relations. It takes form as both a book and a website. These dual publications are the result of an investigation into the “data industrial complex”, specifically the aesthetic and material lives of overlapping phenomena: big data and automation, labour, climate, finance and e-commerce, technological infrastructures, biometrics, behavioural science and surveillance. Over the two-year process, the group focused most specifically on the entangled representations and roles occupied by the natural world and networked digital communications in explanations of how the present is shaped. In a book-length collaboration with designers Persson Valijani, this pandemic-adjusted inquiry is modelled alongside contributions from fields including art, architecture, media theory, urbanism, activism, ethnography, environmental humanities, human ecology, poetry and curatorial practice. A parallel interactive website maps a ‘data eco-system,’ offering subjective navigations between the terrains of data flow, natural resource extraction, and financial and power relations.
The contribution of Slutty Urbanism in this book reflected upon the contemporary fetishism on ‘Big Data’ in the tech industry and society. The presentation of the folder contained with fragmented archival materials told a story of in a remote area, women in a small town suffered from unwanted sexual arouse due to the construction of data center outside of town.
