Sensing data: Encountering data sonifications, materializations, and interactives as knowledge objects

Digital and networked media are characterized by a fundamental disconnection between the modes of operating of these media, the human sensorium and knowledge. In order for humans to consciously participate in this expanded domain of sensibility, additional mediation is required to ‘presentify’ what is not accessible to human perception. This situation has motivated the creation of manifold ‘data objects’ in the form of visualizations, soundscapes and sonifications, 3D materializations, and data-driven interactives in the neighboring domains of art, design, science, and humanities scholarship. These new knowledge objects, as we propose to call them, both produce and mediate knowledge in the process of making data experienceable. They turn that what essentially does not correlate to human sensory capacities into something that the human sensorium is capable of engaging with. As such, they can play a crucial role in providing access, and thereby modalities of critical and creative relating, to what Hansen (2015) describes as the expanded domain of sensibility. Yet, the effects and implications of the sensory specificities of these knowledge objects remain underacknowledged, as are the potentials of these modes of presentifying data. Here, we explore and compare a diversity of such knowledge objects and look at their different media modalities and different experiential qualities, and how these afford ways of knowing. By approaching several knowledge objects as ‘theoretical objects’ (Bal (2013); Damisch in Bois et al. (1998), we investigate which and how experimental sensory techniques are used for data presentification. With this, we want to draw attention to the onto-epistemological implications of the design of these knowledge objects, the main implications being relationality and performativity. Understanding the potential and implications of this performativity would benefit from what we call a creative humanities approach that combines insights from the critical and digital humanities with those from the fields of creative arts and design.