Performing With the Database: Art Geography Approaches to Research on the Data, Trade, Place, Values Nexus, 2015-2017

This qualitative data collection comprises eight interviews and two group conversations collected as part of the doctoral study: Museum of Contemporary Commodities (MoCC): a research performance. The project worked with partners in London and Exeter between 2015-17 to co-produce a series of site responsive, digitally interactive and relational encounters that were devised and staged between commodities, 'consumers' and everyday retail spaces. These resulting qualitative data examine how these events and encounters were realised and to what effects ie. how the people participating perceived both the event and contemporary commodity cultures and their consequences through the lens of their encounter with the project. Accompanying documentation for this data set includes a ‘MoCC zine’ that documents the journey of the project and the process and methods involved in its co-production.

The social and environmental consequences of what has been termed the 'prolific present' are increasingly well documented. Overflowing and abundant, material and intangible commodities are arriving from factories, onto container ships, into warehouses, onto screens, into shops and through homes, into charity shops, recycling yards and waste dumps. An important part of managing and growing this flow of 'stuff' is the capturing, measuring and computational valuing of our consumption practices. How these data processes are constructed, with whose values and to whose profit, and with what impact and to whose detriment, is often obsfuscated or hidden from public scrutiny. If these processes are unknown to us, how can we make informed decisions on how we participate in them? Understanding and challenging the deeply connected and largely invisible relationships between data, trade, places and values has thus become an urgent matter of concern. My practice-led PhD 'Museum of Contemporary Commodities (MoCC): a research performance', combined social art practice with geographic methods to investigate connections between data, commodities, and perceptions of value in contemporary capitalism. The primary aim of this ESRC funded fellowship was to consolidate the knowledge and insights gained in this doctoral study and share them with academic audiences. This included using MoCC as a case study to develop a series of conceptual and methodological accounts of the research design, delivery and impacts in order to contribute to advancing knowledge in human geography, and to work with other scholars, artists and technologists to create a series of more broadly accessible outcomes from research findings.

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