ABSTRACT
In an increasingly digital world, it is hardly surprising that a technology that renders everything as numbers should eventually come to reduce human activity to quantified datasets. This process of objective quantification—referred to by José van Djick as datafication—yields metadata that purports to provide insights into a variety of areas of human social life that are otherwise hidden in complexity, privacy and/or [pedestrian] obscurity. Mediated by sophisticated and increasingly incomprehensible algorithms, these datasets promise access to a truth that is otherwise invisible.
In this chapter we engage with ideas around datafication and quantification of human behavior by turning to the idea of ambient and soft play to consider the ways in which digital media—as both part of datafication and algorithms—can be understood as a territory bounded by a series of paradoxes. We then explore some of the artists exploring playful resistance as a probe, tactic and mode of inquiry for critical reflection on the role of data and data futures in our lives.
