Counter-practices: Understanding sensor datafication through subversive action

Sensors have become embedded in all kinds of environments. Their ubiquity has prompted a boom in scholarly engagement centered around the effects of digitally interconnected sensor media and the data traces they ceaselessly produce. This research generally focuses either on theoretical or philosophical macro-perspectives—approaching the topic “from above,” so to speak—or it is ethnographic, “from below,” analyzing the practices of sensory (self-)surveillance, for example in the context of the quantified self-movement. In this article, we propose a situated, praxeological approach that combines both foci: expanding on the epistemically productive concepts of glitches and breakdowns, we follow three strands of what we call “counter-practices”—hiding in plain sight, dis/simulation, and the exploitation of sensor logics—through which we explore the inherent operations of technological sensing and sensemaking. We trace these counter-practices through historic and recent contexts, considering the interrelation of bodies, media and environments, and extrapolating epistemological conclusions that are meaningful for critiquing the codes, logics, and logistics of recent sensor-media societies. Asking how certain practices elude and subvert intended processes of sensor datafication provides a methodological blueprint for media studies and cultural theory that are faced with an algorithmic and technological situation that has rendered itself largely unobservable.