Critical database as practice: hypomnesis and anamnesis intertwined

This paper critiques reductionist data practices reliant on quantification and analysis integrated into new media art. It focuses on against-the-grain operations critically engaged with data and its many representations. Initially, the work of Sarah Cook will provide a genealogy of data configurations in media art and history through a brief overview of forms of data and information in new media art. Subsequently, the scholarship of Lev Manovich and N. Katherine Hayles will outline the disparity between databases and narratives. In the next section, data’s imaginative quality will take centre stage, affording a critical dimension by building narratable imaginaries and materialities able to grapple with the impossibility of cognising hyperobjects. In the case of unfathomably complex socio-political crises, hyperobjects will illustrate the critical affordance of databases through three case analyses: Forensic Architecture’s 2022 project Drift-Backs in the Aegean Sea; Morehshin Allahyari’s 2015-2016 project Material Speculation: ISIS; and finally, my 2023 project Breathless. To conclude, the operative logic of these cases will open up a new avenue that by a certain framing of data, offers a differential dynamic of information transmission facilitated by the convergence of external and embodied memory, theorised by Bernard Stiegler as hypomnesis and anamnesis consecutively.