Listening in the Afterlife of Data: Aesthetics, Pragmatics, and Incommunication (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781478015291)

In Listening in the Afterlife of Data, David Cecchetto theorizes sound, communication, and data by analyzing them in the contexts of the practical workings of specific technologies, situations, and artworks. In a time he calls the afterlife of data--the cultural context in which data's hegemony persists even in the absence of any belief in its validity--Cecchetto shows how data is repositioned as the latest in a long line of concepts that are at once constitutive of communication and suggestive of its limits. Cecchetto points to the failures and excesses of communication by focusing on the power of listening--whether through wearable technology, internet-based artwork, or the ways in which computers process sound--to pragmatically comprehend the representational excesses that data produces. Writing at a cultural moment in which data has never been more ubiquitous or less convincing, Cecchetto elucidates the paradoxes that are constitutive of computation and communication more broadly, demonstrating that data is never quite what it seems.

Author: David Cecchetto
ISBN-10: 1478015292
ISBN-13: 9781478015291
Publisher: Duke University Press
Language: English
Published: 04/07/2022
Pages: 184
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.91lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.44d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 11/01/2022