Narrating Environmental Data: Story and Place, Architecture and Affect

Abstract: For Helsinki Biennial 2023, we were commissioned to write an environmental audiotour that would narrate the city and its surroundings as sites of environmental sensing and even data. While oriented toward the broader audience, and accessible as downloadable podcasts, the episodes drew on recent years of points in critical data studies as well as experimental practices where performance, narrative, and other poetic methods become involved in outlining what could be called the affective data assemblage. Our interest in questions of landscapes already as data—as models in-situ, as Jane Hutton puts it—as well as in methods such as autographic visualization were one underlying reference point for the task of cultivating particular relational sensibilities in ways that can link to artistic methods, curatorial research, as well as contemporary discourses on materiality of data.