Theatre/Data: Cate Blanchett’s Manifesto of Futurist Finance

Abstract

In The Data Revolution Rob Kitchin writes: ‘given their utility and value, and the amount of effort and resources devoted to producing and analysing them, it is remarkable how little conceptual attention has been paid to data in and of themselves’ (2014: 1). An important reason for this, suggests Kitchin, is that data have been treated as technical phenomena that almost by definition precede interpretation, and exist outside representation. And yet, ‘[d]ata do not exist independently of the ideas, instruments, practices, contexts and knowledges used to generate, process and analyse them’ (2). In response, Kitchin argues that we need to understand these developments within the context of a ‘data assemblage,’ which is ‘composed of many apparatuses and elements that are thoroughly entwined, and develop and mutate over time and space’, framing, in the process, ‘what is possible, desirable and expected of data’ (24).