Program Highlights
keynote by nanna bonde thylstrup
“Vanishing points: technographies of data loss”
Chair: Sebastian Gießmann
Thursday, June 5, 2025
18:00-19:00
open to public
What happens to data when it vanishes? How do digital remains persist even as information seemingly disappears? What can the politics of disappearance tell us about power in datafied worlds?
Disappearance has become a crucial yet understudied force shaping digital experiences and infrastructures. This keynote develops a technographic approach to examine how data loss and digital remains create complex patterns of presence and absence that defy simple narratives of erasure. Through cases ranging from platform architectures to digital archives, it traces how power operates through sophisticated mechanisms of appearing and vanishing, leaving traces that persist in unexpected ways.
By mapping these dynamics of disappearance, the exploration uncovers how our data landscapes are shaped not by mere accumulation, but through intricate processes of loss, persistence, and transformation. The keynote explores how digital societies negotiate memory and forgetting, positioning disappearance itself as a crucial digital experience.
The talk develops theoretical tools for analyzing these dynamics while remaining grounded in concrete technological practices and their political implications. Through this, it compels us to rethink fundamental assumptions about presence, absence, and the complex temporalities and materialities of digital culture.
About Nanna Bonde Thylstrup
Nanna Bonde Thylstrup is Associate Professor in Modern and Digital Culture, and Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded project Data Loss: The Politics of Disappearance, Destruction and Dispossession in Digital Societies (DALOSS). Her research examines how digitization and algorithmic processes transform knowledge infrastructures, with particular focus on the politics and ethics of data, machine learning, and digital infrastructures. She co-leads the Digital Culture Research Cluster at UCPH and has held visiting fellowships at Duke, Cornell, and Columbia Universities. Thylstrup is author of The Politics of Mass Digitization (MIT Press, 2019) and co-editor of Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for the Age of Big Data (MIT Press, 2021) and (W)ARCHIVES: Archival Imaginaries, War, and Contemporary Art (Sternberg Press 2021). Her work appears in journals including Big Data & Society, Journal of Cultural Economy, Information, Communication & Society, First Monday and Media Culture & Society. She serves on the editorial board of Cambridge University Press's series on AI in Culture and Society and regularly consults for cultural heritage organizations and governments on digitization and emerging technologies.
Keynote by Jonathan Gray
Chair: Tatjana Seitz
Friday, June 6, 2025
09:00-10:30
open to public
This talk explores how data is made public on the Internet amidst the rise of social media, platforms and AI. Retracing the emergence of legal and technical conventions of open data, it looks towards a more expansive understanding of public data cultures which shape how we know and live together. Through a series of empirical vignettes, the talk reconsiders data as cultural material, medium of participation and site of transnational coordination. It then turns to two forms of intervention: making data that is considered missing and entrypoints for critical data practice. As well as situating public data cultures in relation to the datafication and platformisation of the web, the talk will highlight the role of web archives in studying these developments.
About Jonathan Gray
Jonathan W. Y. Gray (@jwyg) is Director of the Centre for Digital Culture and Reader in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. He is also cofounder of the Public Data Lab and Research Associate at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) and the médialab (Sciences Po, Paris). He has taught with the School for Poetic Computation in NYC. His research critically and creatively engages with the roles of digital data, methods and infrastructures in society. More can be found at jonathangray.org.
10-Year Anniversary Roundtable by Niels Brügger
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