Typically used for intelligence by security and advertising agencies, in scientific research, or in governance, dashboards present visualisations, insights, oversights, settings, and controls over data. They are a lens into constantly changing data-scapes over which there is an ongoing battle to establish sovereignty.
In her project for Forecast, Brekke creates a speculative fiction around a data dashboard for an ordinary person living in posthuman times. What if people could have a say in how a given AI is trained using their data? And a say over what it is used for? What if people could have real-time insight into the well-being of companion species? What if such a data dashboard could offer an understanding of how one‘s actions and data affect others, human and non-human, elsewhere?
At the Forecast Forum, Brekke will show “user stories,” a software-development method used to describe what a given software needs to achieve. The “users“ of these posthuman dashboards, however, are developed from the perspectives of critical theorists working on the politics of data and algorithms. These user stories and initial designs will constitute the first stage in the development of a larger immersive work.
Jaya Klara Brekke is a cryptographic geographer and designer; writer and strategist at privacy company Nym; and member of Magma Collective Think and Do Tank.
