Overview and update report on the project
January, 2018
This white paper details how the Museum of Random Memory (MoRM) performs data literacy. While still a playful public intervention that takes many different formats depending on the audience, we have found the consistent outcome to be: 1) increased critical consciousness among participants around digitalization and datafication; 2) greater awareness of the link between personal technological devices (especially smart phones) and larger data collection, archiving, and marketing infrastructures; and greater understanding of the difficulty of retaining meaningful memories as and if they are lost within the huge masses of competing data points, from the personal to the global. Given the strong positive outcomes of the intervention, we will continue to push MoRM into new locations in 2018 and 2019. The brief report below will also provide a good overview of the conceptual framework and practical components of this experiment in arts+technology+pedagogy as a response to the powerful impacts of datafication and digitalization in everyday life.
This is part of a series of projects emerging from the Creating Future Memories project at Aarhus University. Creating Future Memories is a citizen-focused effort to identify and foster ongoing and new creative methods of regaining control of the ‘big data’ we regularly produce in our everyday lives.