Sensing as Coding
Zhang Zihao · 2024
This chapter interrogates environmental sensing practices in terms of its constructed objectivity drawing historians Lorraine Daston’s and Peter Galison’s notion of the paradigm of mechanical objectivity. Sensing is coding, which is a cultural technique in the digital age that encodes the environment into “datascapes.” Drawing artwork examples from artists, including David Bowen, Simon Weckert, Sougwen Chung, Mileece, and Dietmar Offenhuber, this chapter proposes four types of coding operations that could subvert mainstream narratives that environmental sensing accumulates “big data” for optimization and control.