The Data Body as Archive

Every click, search, and scroll generates data that accumulates into what scholars have called the “data body” — a digital double that is bought, sold, profiled, and surveilled without the knowledge or consent of the person it represents. This session enters the intimate territory of selfhood and surveillance through the work of Laila Shereen Sakr, known as VJ Um Amel. Her book Arabic Glitch uses the concept of the glitch — the breakdown, the error, the unexpected — as both an aesthetic and an analytical tool for understanding how algorithmic systems process Arabic language and Arab bodies. As the founder of R-Shief, one of the largest repositories of Arabic-language tweets, Sakr brings firsthand experience of how data archives become sites of both knowledge and vulnerability. The companion readings on data bodies as targets and the algorithmic self push these questions further, asking what happens when our digital traces become instruments of state violence.

Who owns your data body? What happens when the archive that preserves your words can also be used to target you? And what can the aesthetics of the glitch — the moment the system breaks down — reveal about the systems that claim to represent us?