Apophenia—the recognition of patterns within randomness—is, as Hito Steyerl (2016) has argued, a condition of the rapid multiplication of chaotic plumes of data swirling around us, data riven with errors, misunderstandings and half-guesses somewhere between the seen and unseen. On the other hand, as Lepselter (2016) argues, it is just this sort of “misrecognition” that proliferates in an age when truths are submerged. Here, apophenia is a survival skill in a paranoid age. But with the emergence of new digital audio visual technologies and their networked connection through social media, the opportunities for opening up a dialogue between the visible and the non-visible, as well as between vision, sound and the other senses have grown. We can today bring cameras to places that were out of access before (think of drone, wearables, life-logging cams) as well as tools and techniques allowing us to visualise data that is not visible in nature (such as bodily and aff...
Occasional posts on anthropologically interesting science fiction, anthropological futures and my own future as an anthropologist.