In Listening in the Afterlife of Data, David Cecchetto theorizes sound, communication, and data by analyzing them in the contexts of the practical workings of specific technologies, situations, and artworks. In a time he calls the afterlife of data—the cultural context in which data’s hegemony persists even in the absence of any belief in its validity—Cecchetto shows how data is repositioned as the latest in a long line of concepts that are at once constitutive of communication and suggestive of its limits. Cecchetto points to the failures and excesses of communication by focusing on the power of listening—whether through wearable technology, internet-based artwork, or the ways in which computers process sound—to pragmatically comprehend the representational excesses that data produces. Writing at a cultural moment in which data has never been more ubiquitous or less convincing, Cecchetto elucidates the paradoxes that are constitutive of computation and communication more broadly, demonstrating that data is never quite what it seems.

David Cecchetto is Associate Professor of Critical Digital Theory in the Department of Humanities at York University, author of Humanesis: Sound and Technological Posthumanism, and coauthor of Ludic Dreaming: How to Listen Away from Contemporary Technoculture.

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction. Incommunication  1
1. Networking Sound and Medium Specificity  21
2. Listening and Technicity  44
3. Incomputable and Integral Incommunications  62
4. Algorithms, Art, and Sonicity  84
5. Listening and Technicity (Once and for All, Again and Again)  105
Postscript. Epidemiological Afterlives  124
Appendix. Aural Incommunications Seminar Prompt  131
Notes  135
Bibliography  155
Index  163