Listening in the Afterlife of Data: Aesthetics, Pragmatics, and Incommunication(Thought in the Act)

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.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments  ix Introduction. Incommunication  1 1. Networking Sound and Medium Specificity  21 2. Listening and Technicity  44 3. Incomputable and Integral Incommunications  62 4. Algorithms, Art, and Sonicity  84 5. Listening and Technicity (Once and for All, Again and Again)  105 Postscript. Epidemiological Afterlives  124 Appendix. Aural Incommunications Seminar Prompt  131 Notes  135 Bibliography  155 Index  163

About the Author :
David Cecchetto is Associate Professor of Critical Digital Theory in the Department of Humanities at York University, author of Humanesis: Sound and Technological Posthumanism, and coauthor of Ludic Dreaming: How to Listen Away from Contemporary Technoculture.

Review :
“David Cecchetto makes an insightful, exciting, and original intervention in the possibility (or impossibility) of relating to humans and machines and, in pure pragmatist spirit, thinking and doing. Addressing urgent questions about the role, use, and scope of computational data within contemporary society and culture, Cecchetto challenges established orthodoxies that interpret relationships between the universal and the particular within communication. Listening in the Afterlife of Data will have a great impact in media and sound studies. It is a precious resource.” - M. Beatrice Fazi, author of (Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics) “Rich in paradoxical thought, David Cecchetto’s book explores the incommunication at the heart of communication. Doubling the paradox doubling, he finds that incommunication nevertheless always communicates something. Challenging and intensely rewarding, this book is highly recommended for any interested in data, communication, and listening as an aesthetic response as well as an acoustic sense.” - N. Katherine Hayles, author of (Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational) "Listening in the Afterlife of Data is an essential read for artists and scholars interested in digital theory and engaging with and through sound."  - Monika Jaeckel (Journal of Posthumanism)