Haunted Data

"Our engagement with data - big or small - is never as simplistic or straightforward as might first appear. Indeed, the author argues that our relationship with data is haunted with errors, dead ends, ghostly figures, and misunderstandings that challenge core assumptions about the nature of thought, consciousness, mind, cognition, affect, communication, control and rationality, both human and non-human. Using contemporary controversies from "weird science" including the field of priming and its uncanny relations to animal telepathy, as well as artificial intelligences and their curious relation to psychic research, Blackman shows how some of the current crises in science in these areas reveal more than scientists are willing or even able to acknowledge. This book also provides a nuanced survey of the historical context to contemporary debates, going back to the nineteenth-century origins of modern computation and science to explain the ubiquity and oddness of our data relations. Drawing from radical philosophies of science, feminist science studies, queer theory, cultural studies and affect studies, the book develops a manifesto for how artists, philosophers and scientists might engage creatively and critically with digital communication."--