Auf der EASST/4S-Konferenz in Amsterdam sprach Martina Klausner im Panel „Voicing Places“ über die Verflochtenheit von Daten und Politik. Ihre Erzählung spannte sich von der akustischen Vielfalt von Signalen und Geräuschen im urbanen Straßenraum bis zu den unsichtbaren und unhörbaren Signalen, die von Induktionsschleifen, Sensoren und Scannern geschrieben und gesendet werden. Sie erklärte, weshalb in der Datenlandschaft Frankfurts Autodaten omnipräsent sind, während Daten zu anderen Mobilitätsformen nur in sehr begrenztem Maße vorhanden sind und annlassbezogenen in Handarbeit zu Datenflicken zusammengenäht werden. Der Vortrag ging der Frage nach, wie sich Politik in Daten-Assemblagen einschreibt und wie diese Daten letztlich selbst Politisches ausdrücken.
Street noise: tracing data politics in urban traffic infrastructures
Pannel
Voicing Places
Autorin
Martina Klausner
Abstract
In my contribution I seek to listen to the different signals that are generated as part of urban traffic and administrative information infrastructures and how the resulting data assemble voice politics in different forms.
Urban streets are filled with noise: roaring engines, chatting neighbours, bicycle bells, all voicing demands for their space in public place. Unheard and mostly unnoticed by road users, other signals fill the urban public space: inductors embedded in the asphalt of the road generate and transmit signals, indicating the numbers and movement of (some) road users and ultimately form the basis for the planning and monitoring of the city’s traffic. My contribution to the panel seeks to listen to these signals and asks how they participate in the politics of redistributing space for urban traffic. As part of the historically grown traffic and administrative information infrastructures, traffic data are assembled in particular ways.
Weiterlesen
To no surprise, signals counting cars and controlling their flows and stops have been central for the development of traffic data infrastructures. Just as cars dominate the roads, traffic data infrastructures are also primarily populated by car data. However, my interest is less on the quantity of certain data but on the trails and forms that data take and how they assemble and voice political claims in different ways. While car data are meant to flow continuously, data on bicycle traffic are knit together in what I call data patches: context-specific and issue-related data collections that span various sources, times and places, enabling different data stories and politics.