Sun-ha Hong

Sun-ha Hong analyses how new media and its data become invested with ideals of precision, objectivity and truth – especially through aesthetic, speculative, and otherwise apparently non-rational means. He works to produce critical, historically informed diagnoses of the contemporary faith in "raw" data, sensing machines, and algorithmic decision-making, and of their public promotion as the next great leap towards objective knowledge. At MIT, he is working on completing one book project and beginning another. The first, "Data Epistemologies / Surveillance and Uncertainty", analyses the changing boundaries of the known, the probable and the unknowable vis-à-vis early twenty-first century technologies of state "dragnet" surveillance and self-tracking. The second, "A Speculative Literature for a Data-Driven Society", examines the genealogy of our imaginations about data, innovation and surveillance – from science fiction of the early twentieth century to experimental prototypes of ‘big’ data in the present day. He received his Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. His work has been published through journals like First Monday and European Journal of Cultural Studies. His CV and writing are available at: http://sunhahong.org