Theory as Noir: a cartoon version of an academic article
Abstract
Expanding on the growing movement to take academic and other erudite subjugated knowledges and distill them into some graphic form, this “cartoon” is a recounting of the author’s 2014 article, “Big Data, Actionable Information, Scientific Knowledge and the Goal of Control,” Teknokultura, Vol. 11/no. 3, pp. 529-54. It is an analysis of the idea of Big Data and an argument that its power relies on its instrumentalist specificity and not its extent. Mind control research in general and optogenetics in particular are the case study. Noir seems an appropriate aesthetic for this analysis, so direct quotes from the article are illustrated by publically available screen shots from iconic and unknown films of the 20th century. The only addition to the original article is a framing insight from the admirable activist network CrimethInc.
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