Bio

My name is Gabriel Pereira, and I am currently a PhD fellow at Aarhus University (Denmark). My main research interest are critical studies of data infrastructures. My PhD work focuses in understanding how pervasive data infrastructures constrain and enable how we think and experience memory and archives today. In my research, so far, I have been drawing on critical infrastructure studies (STS), new materialism, platform studies, critical code/algorithm studies and other related feminist/critical perspectives on technology.

My research methods are experimental and collaborative, involving both ethnographic work and arts-based inquiry. Most recently, as part of my PhD work, I have been developing the Museum of Random Memory with a large network of researchers, activists and artists. It is a series of arts-based public interventions and experiments designed to spark reflection about the underlying complexities of everyday digital media usage. We explore questions such as: “How can we retake control of the Big Data we produce in our everyday lives, especially now that digital platforms continually track us and create memories on our behalf?”

Other work I’ve been doing focuses, for example, on: APIs as elements of infrastructures that enable and shape the networking of urban data; rhetorical analysis of young people’s experiences of their social media usage; and more artistic approaches to Artificial Intelligence in the archives of museums.

A lot of my research projects stem from different collaborations. To mention a few:

• the Digital Living Research Commons / Future Making Space, home to diverse projects on datafication and digitalization;
• the Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research, a global network of experimentation in arts and research.
• the Global Media Technologies & Cultures Lab at MIT, headed by Prof. Lisa Parks, where I had the privilege of being a visiting Grad Student (2018-2019).

For more info, have a look at: Projects, Publications, and my CV.

Or just contact me via e-mail.