Location H (in Andromeda, next to the Fermenting Data Random Access Memory)

If you are not inside the library building, step in and look for Andromeda and in there look for Fermenting Data RAM.

These fermenting jars are locations. Sites of life-sustaining chemical reactions that generate energy. You can observe how cabbages and salt become a host to microbes as the fermentation progresses.We can’t see these microscopic organisms with a naked eye, but we know they are there. In millions. Can you smell the change they provoke? Soon enough you will be able to taste it. Once eaten, they will continue their good work in my gut supporting my digestion, boosting bioavailability of nutrients, and my body’s healthy inflammatory response.

What could be the good work that can be done while living the good life supported by microbes?

Plant, minerals, microbes and I. We create patterns, in time, in bodies, in places. We inhabit each other while also being part of other configurations. At home, at work, in school, on the street, in a jar, in the garden, in the city, on social media platforms, in governments, what are the patterns of good life there? What is the good work that is done there? Who does it and under what conditions? And for whom?

Fermenting data: Aarhus 8000-8220 is a speculation about data in the city, and a collaboration with artists and other humans and nonhumans to process, preserve, intervene, and invent fermenting data practices as changes, movements and transformations that can be tasted, smelled, listened to, eaten. In the times when digital transformation and datafication of everything and everyone seems inevitable, let us demystify data and computational processes that work on data, by engaging with them before they are data. Before they are understood as a raw fact and when they are always in relation to something and someone. By going to the source of any data: bodies, things, relations, and interactions of all kinds, and by becoming part of fermentation/transformation.