This document discusses how data and perception are limited and divided. It describes how companies and governments are using tools like Hadoop MapReduce to analyze rapidly expanding data from various sources like sensors, videos, and location data. An example is given of correlating different data events, like financial transactions and drone images, to detect patterns and trigger predictive alerts about potential border crossings. The conclusion discusses how perception has been transformed by new technologies for displaying and projecting data spectacles.

1. Data Mobilities
Louise Amoore
Durham University louise.amoore@dur.ac.uk @AmooreLouise
Visionbox
2014

2. Mobility, data and perception
“The question is not how perception arises, but how is it limited
[…] to know how and why this image is chosen to form part of
my perception, while an infinite number of other images remain
excluded from it” (Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, 1912:
34).”
“The data of the senses, left to themselves, present to us the
real movement as an undivided whole. The division is the work
of our imagination… to fix the moving images of our ordinary
experiences, like the flash which illuminates a stormy landscape
by night” (1912: 248).
Francis Galton, ‘Composite
Portraits’, 1878.

3. Flattening the border: MapReduce & predictive
analytics
“Every call, tweet, e-mail, download, or purchase generates valuable data. Companies and
governments are increasingly relying on Hadoop MapReduce to unlock the hidden value of this
rapidly expanding data […] Sensor output, videos, log files, location data, genomics, behavioural
data are just a few of the data sources driving Hadoop use (MapR for Apache Hadoop®, 2011).
“J has been pre-paid to transport human
cargo across the border. Earlier, he went to
change pesos to US dollars. Yesterday he
drove his truck to a local cantina for a drink.
He didn’t notice the Aero Vironment drone
flying overhead, which caught several images
of him and his truck. All of these ‘events’ were
captured by different systems. The challenge
is detecting and correlating significant events
from all the other images, transaction, and
communications. The predictive perimeter
alert is triggered by a pattern of events in an
event stream processing system – software
that consumes streams of real-time data and
converts them into actionable decision
patterns” (Predictive Perimeter 2014).

4. Duration and mobilities
Bani Abidi Security Barriers A-L
(2008)

5. Bani Abidi (2010) The Distance From Here

6. Conclusions: data mobilities
“Perception transformed alongside new technological forms of
spectacle, display, projection” (Jonathan Crary, 1999,
Suspensions of Perception).