First, let me introduce myself. My name is Gabriel Pereira, and I am from Brazil. I am currently a visiting PhD student here at Comparative Media Studies – MIT, and a PhD fellow at Aarhus University (Denmark). My main research interests are critical studies of data infrastructures. I am particularly interested in understanding how these pervasive data infrastructures constrain and enable how we think and experience memory and archives today.

My research methods are experimental and collaborative, involving both arts-based inquiry and ethnographic work. Most recently, I have been developing the Museum of Random Memory with a large network of researchers, activists and artists. It is a series of arts-based public interventions and experiments designed to spark reflection about the underlying complexities of everyday digital media usage. We explore questions such as: How can we retake control of the Big Data we produce in our everyday lives, especially now that digital platforms continually track us and create memories on our behalf?

Other work I’ve done focuses, for example, on APIs as elements of infrastructures that enable and shape the networking of urban data; rethorical analysis of young people’s experiences of their social media usage; and more artistic approaches to Artificial Intelligence in the archives of museums. In my research, so far, I have been drawing on critical infrastructure studies (from STS), new materialism, platform studies, critical code/algorithm studies and other related feminist/critical perspectives on technology.

A lot of my research projects stem from different collaborations. To mention a few: the Digital Living Research Commons at Aarhus University, which is home to diverse projects on datafication and digitalisation (where Annette Markham, my supervisor, is co-director); and the Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research, which is a global network of collaboration and experimentation in arts and research.

Now: What am I doing here? I became interested in this class because it relates directly to my research practice in critical studies of technology. That being said, it offers new perspectives to me, specially related with values-driven/community-driven design. Often I have used research and arts perspectives without necessarily thinking in design terms, so it would certainly be a useful tool. Also, I feel that, specially today, when our world becomes saturated in digital tech, we need to approach it from many different perspectives and tools. Learning how to think about technology from a social change perspective and the design elements of this is part not only of studying technology, but of thinking about how to create better technology and research for the world.