Analyzing public interventions through the lens of experimentalism: the case of the Museum of Random Memory

ABSTRACT

Over 30 computational scientists, designers, artists, and activists collaboratively performed eight Museum of Random Memory workshops and exhibitions from 2016 to 2018. Here, we explore how the framework of ‘experimentation’ helped us analyze our own iterative development of techniques to foster critical data literacy. After sketching key aspects of experimentation across disciplines, we detail moments within where researchers tweaked, observed, tested, reflected, and tweaked again. This included changing scale, format, and cultural context; observing how people responded to digital versus analog memory-making activities; modifying prompts to evoke different conversations among participants about how future memories might be imagined or read by future archeologists; and finding creative ways to discuss and trouble ethics of data sharing. We conclude that coopting some of the techniques typical in natural science laboratories can prompt scholar activists to continuously recalibrate their processes and adjust interactions as they build pedagogical strategies for fostering critical data literacy in the public sphere.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical data literacy
• research methods
• participatory action research
• creative practice
• experimental methods
• media literacy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Annette N. Markham (Professor of Information Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark) is a philosopher of method, specializing in developing epistemological frameworks for rethinking ethics and research methods for digitally-saturated social contexts. She also conducts ethnographic studies of identity and relational formation among humans as these are complicated by datafication and automated decision making.

Gabriel Pereira is a PhD fellow at Aarhus University (Denmark). His main research interest are critical studies of data, algorithms, and digital infrastructures, including what kind of critical data literacy is needed to engage more consciously with them. In his research, he draws on critical infrastructure studies (STS), new materialism, platform studies, critical code/algorithm studies, and other related feminist/critical perspectives on technology.

Notes

1 We particularly acknowledge Sarah Schorr, who participated in all of the MoRM experiments and helped with early versions of our thinking about experimentation as a lens. Other researchers involved in this initial meeting include: Ann Light, Andrew Sempere, Bente Larsen, Christopher Bratton, Dalida Benfield, Elyzabeth Holford, Elizabeth Whitney, Joy Fuqua, Justin Lacko, Kasper Ostrowski, Mads Rehder, Martin Brynskov, and Ramona Dremljuga.

2 The four stages associated with the Literacy Method include Investigation, Thematization, Problematization, and Systematization. As these stages are not central to this article, we do not discuss them further here.

3 This is a selective list, and therefore should not be read as all inclusive. It also highlights certain activities and designs that demonstrate systematic and rigorous processes one might associate with what happens in a lab and that might be useful in adding to one’s own repertoire.

4 We could also read Sociologist Harold Garfinkel’s ‘breaching experiments’ as an act of demonstration. In his original writing, Garfinkel offers ‘a word of reservation’ that his breaching experiments ‘are not properly speaking experimental,’ (1967, 38) but demonstrations of these processes. There is also a sense that these exercises can be repeated in other situations, which gives a sense of replication, but not with the intention to validate the findings of the earlier breaching experiment, but to see what these techniques can reveal for other people in other contexts (originally with Garfinkel’s students, but later also with the readers of his book). Thus, the inspiration of Garfinkel that carries his legacy forward is how an experiment could work as an easy public demonstration of sociological formations in action.

5 The official name is ‘Experience of Angicos’ or ‘The 40 hours of Angicos.’ The word ‘experience’ can be used synonymously with ‘experiment’ in Portuguese, but also can be used more broadly to signify any form of testing or attempt.

6 As part of MoRM, we intentionally played around with concepts borrowed (and negated) from museums and galleries, such as (un-)curation, (dis-)preservation, and (de-)acquisition. These terms were used as both a contestation and playful performance of museum practices (see Bratton et al. 2016 for glossary and discussion).

7 To remark further on this point: Often experiments in qualitative, emergent, or participatory design research contexts are not immediately visible, as they occur through continual enactment, only understood or appreciated as a series of steps or decisions at critical junctures in retrospect. This is the case with MoRM. Here, to capture some of the experimental moves we made, we needed to do some reverse engineering.

8 Pun intended.

9 A term from mid-twentieth century media studies that depicted a myth that media worked much like an injection or bullet, penetrating the ‘victim’ to influence how they thought and subsequently acted.