The laboratory occupies a special place in Science and Technology Studies. Whether as a secluded site for the production of scientific expertise or as a space for field experimentation that engages the public in endless variations, laboratories have the power to shape societies because they influence our collective imagination of possible futures. In this talk, I will focus on data centers as laboratories for digital societies, where the role of human actors is at stake. As resource-hungry harbingers of European sovereignty, data centers engineer particular roles for local environments. They spawn conflicts and transform relations between citizens and the state, but are difficult to access. Based on ethnographic research in Denmark where hypescale data centers are being built, I will show how data center emplacement impacts democratic participation—not in the form of open protest, but subtly and in ways that invite for a closer examination of changing relationships between citizens, big tech, local environments, and the state. Seen as laboratories, data centers raise new questions for Science and Technology Studies and invite us to reconsider the role of human actors in our own experimentation.

Brit Ross Winthereik is Professor of Human-Centered Digitalization at the Dept. of Technology, Management and Economics at the Technical University of Denmark. She has a PhD in Science and Technology Studies and anthropology from Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her current research revolves around digitalization processes and the use of data in the public sector of contemporary welfare societies with a particular focus on information infrastructures and human life within. Core to this interest is processes of inclusion and exclusion, data use and accountability in an age of digital citizenship. Her new research is a regional study of data centres in Denmark with a focus on ‘ressourcification’. Among her many publications count ‘Monitoring Movements in Development Aid: Recursive Infrastructures and Partnerships’ (MIT Press, 2013, with Casper Bruun Jensen), ‘Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis’ (Duke University Press, 2021, with Andrea Ballestero), and ‘Handbook for the Anthropology of Technology’ (Palgrave Handbook Series, 2021, with Maja Hojer Bruun el al).

STS scholarship has revealed the myriad ways in which laboratories play a crucial role in knowledge production, from routine testing to the promise of cutting-edge, world-changing science. The current attacks on science and on diversity make it more urgent than ever to examine critically the role played by privileged spaces for knowledge production such as the laboratory in shaping Science.

Underneath the shiny promise of the experimental space, the reality is that laboratories are easier spaces for some folx to inhabit than others. This may be concrete, tangible limitations such as doors with access codes, ramps, work bench heights and signage. It may also be networks of influence built on intersections of gender, ethnicity and education that make themselves felt through more subtle cues such as un/familiarity with the vocabularies, uniforms and etiquette of the laboratory.

In my talk, I will share some reflections based on labs that I have encountered as both visiting researcher/ethnographer and as organiser/coordinator. Through these examples I will tease out how the specificities of each instantiation shape the knowledge produced and suggest how we might think with the unavoidable fact that laboratories are always, already situated in ways that risk re/producing a highly normative version of doing Science.

STS scholarship around the laboratory has a crucial role to play right now in connecting the visible and invisible barriers to entry with the broader sociopolitical climate. Given this, to what extent might contemporary reformulations of the lab be even more vital in forging cross-disciplinary conversations with a diverse range of stakeholders?

Katherine Harrison, Ph.D., is Associate Professor in Gender Studies at Linköping University. Her research sits at the intersection of Science & Technology Studies, media studies, and feminist theory, bringing critical perspectives on knowledge production to studies of different digital technologies. She is currently co-PI for two WASP-HS (Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program – Humanity and Society) projects titled: “The ethics and social consequences of AI and caring robots. Learning trust, empathy and accountability” and “Operationalising ethics for AI: translation, implementation and accountability challenges”.

At the beginning of the new millennium, Jakob Senneby squinted at a grayscale image of his brain while a doctor traced a series of white blobs on the screen. His doctor told him that these figures, captured by an MRI scan, were “white spots”: signs of damage to the nervous system that are associated with multiple sclerosis. In the following years, Senneby—one half of the artist duo Goldin+Senneby—cycled through experimental and largely ineffectual treatments, tracking the progress of the disease with each scan, with each crop of “attacks” launched by his immune system. As he lost faith in the drugs, Senneby learned that the white spots have proven to be a source of immense, hidden value: a booming economy is based on visualizing, counting, and measuring the spots in the development of pharmaceuticals. The drugs have become more and more successful in treating the white spots in the image, but not in addressing the onset of permanent disability—the most critical consequence of the disease. Nevertheless, the value of the market for treatments has reached nearly $30 billion per year.

 For Swallow Image, Goldin+Senneby will give a presentation on the evolution of “sick images”—depictions of illness that obscure the accounts of patients—and the lucrative market for MS drugs. The event picks up on two related works by Goldin+Senneby: Spot Price, a blockchain-based artwork that links scans of Senneby’s diseased brain to the value of the drugs targeting such images; and “Regions of Interest,” an essay on living as a medical specimen and source of profit for drug companies, both published by Triple Canopy.

Goldin+Senneby (since 2004) is an artist duo whose work has explored how economic structures shape our society. In recent years, their practice has increasingly shifted towards questions of care, ecology and the politics of diagnosis. The duo consistently returns to the models, systems and metaphors that structure and frame how we can understand the world. The recurring question for them is how we see rather than what we see.

 Goldin+Senneby has exhibited at the biennials in São Paulo, Istanbul and Gwangju; held solo exhibitions at The Power Plant in Toronto, Kadist in Paris, e-flux in New York, and Index, Konsthall C and Tensta Konsthall in Stockholm. Their works are included in the collections of Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Whitney Museum of American Art; and The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

 Swallow Image is presented as part of their ongoing solo exhibition Flare-Up at Accelerator, Stockholm.