Search routines: tales of databases

Databases pervade our everyday life, they are involved in the individual's most fundamental activities. Through their near invisibility and resistance to narration they produce subtle forms of collective control and normalization, accompanied by keywords such as: mass surveillance, big data, user generated content, etc. The publication „Search Routines: Tales of Databases“ enlarges on the topics discussed in the exhibition, the workshop and during the symposium which took place at D21 Kunstraum and sublab hackerspace Leipzig in 2014. A series of interviews review artistic strategies like narration or the translation of data and algorithms to adress the invisibility of databases. Reports from the workshops tell about the potential of making the invisible visible or simply of hiding oneself from the databases' range of view. The symposium discussed databases from a sociological and cultural sciences perspective.