I’ll give a talk about Public Data Cultures at Cultivating Data Natures, Lancaster University on Wednesday 9th July 2025.

The event is a collaboration between Abandon Normal Devices, Deco Publique, Lancaster Arts and Lancaster University – and will feature talks, performances and screenings.

You can find out more and register here, and some further details are copied below.

Cultivating Data Natures

Wednesday 9 July 2025 | 7:00–9:30pm | Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster University Free to attend – Registration essential

On Wednesday 9 July, Lancaster University’s School of Arts and the Future Places Centre invite you to an evening exploring how data shapes our relationship with place, environment, and the future.

Cultivating Data Natures brings together internationally renowned contributors in a lively, interdisciplinary setting. The event is presented in partnership with Abandon Normal Devices, Deco Publique, and Lancaster Arts, and marks the closing celebration of the Future Places Centre—Lancaster University’s interdisciplinary hub for experimental research into data, design, and environmental futures.

The theme of cultivation runs throughout the evening as a research and innovation method. We want to ask how we tend to data, how we nurture new imaginaries, and how we grow more just, sustainable, and imaginative relationships between people, technology, and the natural world.

Event Highlights

Jonathan Gray – Public Data Cultures Drawing from his forthcoming book (Polity, October 2025), Gray offers a radical rethinking of public data as cultural and political material. Rather than framing data simply as a resource to be opened or protected, he argues for forms of public data practice rooted in care, participation, and solidarity — essential for making sense of today’s interconnected social and ecological crises.

BRiGHTBLACK – Gardeners of the 5th Industrial Revolution A performance lecture set in a speculative future where artificial intelligence has liberated humanity from labour. In the GrowDome, the audience joins a group of post-labour gardeners navigating fossils, simulations, and hybrid consciousnesses to reimagine ecological life in a future Morecambe Bay. Combining storytelling, game engines, and participatory dialogue, BRiGHTBLACK ask: who are we becoming?

LUMI – Film by Abelardo Gil-Fournier & Jussi Parikka A synthetic intelligence is trained on historical landscape photography in an attempt to repaint the Earth for climate repair. LUMI is a meditative video essay on snow, light, memory and machine vision—a planetary fiction that poses urgent questions about time, perception, and the aesthetics of environmental data.