#Datathief to digitize code

However, as we know, data is non-visual and non-representational, and flows through complex networks of algorithmic systems in order to assess and shape our experiences of the world. Perhaps these images then might be the objects of the data thief’s interest, images which seem to encode obscured historical and political struggles. Throughout the film, digitized images that we see reflected in the data thief’s glasses seem to burst through the cinematic form and interrupt the narrative and various interview segments. In some sense, then, Akomfrah gestures to an understanding that databases might democratize power relations in the digital age, such that data might be rescued by countercultural or resistive practices.Īt the same time, I’m also compelled to consider in what way Akomfrah uses the term “data” – specifically, what data “looks” like, what might it contain, and how it might be mobilized for speculative encounters with future. This data thief then is one who mines the archives of history in order to surface some hidden meaning or message that might render possible a sociopolitical transformation.

#Datathief to digitize code

We are invited in the first few minutes of the film to imagine the data thief two hundred years into the future, who looks back upon late 20 th century in order to crack the code embedded in certain “techno fossils” and grasp glimpses of a black technocultural future. I’m interested in the character of the “data thief,” and how this figure might serve as a metaphor for Akomfrah’s own filmmaking practice (by way of the film’s form as a documentary/fiction/video essay hybrid), as well as the Afrofuturist project more generally.