On the Open World of Big Data: A Reading of Alex Rivera and Ghayath Almadhoun

On the Open World of Big Data: A Reading of Alex Rivera and Ghayath Almadhoun

Big Data produces optical regimes, derived in part from military and satellite imaging, crowd management and tracking, and target acquisition systems. These systems are significantly about bodies, or the body in physical space, and increasingly shape the social imaginary. Data roams this open space, but it is restricted to bodies. Jean-Luc Nancy and Achille Mbembe have argued for a philosophical or figurative opening to a neutral collective space as a corrective to structural violence that divides people, yet their versions of Enlightenment egalitarianism reproduce rather than contest the sided world produced by Big Data. The essay explores critical readings of the neutral open in Alex Rivera's film Sleep Dealer and Ghayath Almadhoun and Marie Silkeberg's poem ''The Celebration'' to show that for them structural asymmetry defines open space under Big Data and is not available as a figurative solution or dissolution of biopower.