Kim Albrecht

Kim Albrecht conducts research at the intersection of data visualization, technology, and culture. He is a professor of information design at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, Germany, a principal at metaLAB at Harvard and Berlin and a faculty associate at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Albrecht is known for his exploration of the aesthetic properties of data, and his work spans teaching, research, and application.

→ kimalbrecht.com

Publication Contribution
Counter-Counter Information on Data, Information Warfare and Second-Order Observation

Throughout history, data has been a tool for producing enlightenment. The idea of capturing processes as numerical values, tracking them over time and deriving patterns from them has been central to scientific knowledge production. It has enabled a deeper understanding of nature and the cosmos and contributed to longer, healthier lives. Data functioned as an epistemic instrument: a means to render the world legible.1

The emergence of the internet fundamentally altered this role. Data became not only a component of scientific inquiry but something that nearly everyone produces continuously and involuntarily. Today, more information exists about an average citizen than about a king two hundred years ago. At the same time, the function of data shifted. It became the underlying infrastructure of mass media: images, text, video, networks and social relations all rely on data as a mode of storage and circulation. Data turned into a universal form of mediation – the ultimate meta-medium. Rather than leading to further enlightenment, new dynamics emerged: data as a form of power concentrated within a small number of technology companies; data as an instrument of political conflict.2

It is at this point that Infocry by fantastic little splash begins its investigation. The project addresses data as a site of information warfare, focusing on practices of misinformation and disinformation. Social media platforms – originally designed to connect people – have become arenas in which narratives are strategically produced and amplified. Through coordinated inauthentic behaviour, social bots mass-generate content to erode trust, circulate false narratives and polarise societies.

Lera Malchenko and Oleksandr Hants capture, store, analyse and categorise these inauthentic forms of communication. Their artistic practice translates abstract data operations into a material and spatial form. The project gives misinformation a body – something that can be observed, encountered and interrogated. In doing so, it reframes data not as a neutral record but as an active force embedded in feedback loops of action and reaction. The chorus machine follows a David-versus-Goliath logic: artistic resistance confronting large-scale, state-level narrative manipulation. The work insists that counteraction remains possible.

To describe this gesture, the project can be understood as an instance of counter-counter information: an intervention that does not simply oppose propaganda, but reflects on the mechanisms through which counter-narratives themselves operate and circulate.

This reflexive stance resonates with concepts from cybernetics and media theory, particularly the figure of the second-order observer – an observer that observes observation itself.3 Infocry materialises this perspective in the form of a 3D-printed object: a vase that functions as a container, a carrier of the internet’s mis- and dis-information. Through hypertext and networked media, a new kind of genie was released – one in which data, originally meaning ‘the given,’ becomes malleable, distorted and weaponised. In a moment where distinctions between human and machine agency increasingly dissolve into data processes, the promise of enlightenment appears distant. Communication no longer operates as a linear transmission from sender to receiver.4 The meta-medium has become a battlefield, and fantastic little splash transform this battlefield into an object of reflection and augmentation.

__________
1 Peter Galison, ‘Images Scatter into Data, Data Gather into Images,’ in Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 300–23.
2 Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019).
3 Kim Albrecht, Insight by De-sign: A Calculus of Computation (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2025); George Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969).