abstract:

The paper discusses the need of raising awareness and building modes of empowerment and emancipation in today’s data driven metropoleis. It presents the challenges and misconceptions lying behind the constant accumulation and analysis of urban data and it questions the ways these processes progressively tend to define a new condition for the urban environment. While examining whose interests they have come to serve, the paper at the same time claims that possible responses to a call for resistance can derive from art. Four workshops organized in Athens in 2013, led by artists and initiated by the author are discussed as examples.