Expanded Data Workshop

July 2025, University of McMaster

The Expanded Data event, hosted by the Critical Data Studio in partnership with the Factory Media Centre, was a three-day gathering that invited artists, scholars, and audiences to reimagine how data can be experienced, performed, and critically engaged. Drawing inspiration from Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema (1970), the event emphasized experimental and interdisciplinary approaches to data, moving beyond its conventional use as information and instead treating it as a cultural, aesthetic, and performative medium.
Participants explored diverse frameworks including glitch aesthetics, speculative design, lo-fi and anti-computing methods, counter-archives, queer data perspectives, and artificial life to push the boundaries of how data can be understood and represented. Through installations, talks, and performances, Expanded Data fostered dialogue about the social, ethical, and cultural dimensions of computation and the futures it shapes.


Team Leaders
The event was organized by a collaborative team of scholars and artists whose leadership shaped its vision:
Dr. Andrea Zeffiro (McMaster University) Associate Professor in Communication Studies and Media Arts, she conceptualized and led the Expanded Data project, building its intellectual and creative framework.
Dr. Stephen Kelly (McMaster University) Assistant Professor of Engineering and artist, known for hybrid mechatronic works combining nature-inspired computing with activism, he guided the technical and artistic integrations of the event.
Dr. Chelsea Miya (University of Guelph) Researcher in data ethics, gender, and sustainability, she contributed critical perspectives on how data intersects with culture and design.
Rachelle Sabourin (McMaster University)  Doctoral candidate in Communication Studies and Media Arts, with expertise in feminist activism and cultural protest, she provided leadership in arts administration and critical framing.
Mackie Martin. Artist and recent graduate, specializing in glitch aesthetics, who played a key role in the creative production and visual design of the project.

Surreal Data Surveillance in Instagram Ads

This project explores how Instagram’s advertising algorithm collects and manipulates user data, blending digital research with surrealist-inspired art. Drawing on theories of surveillance capitalism (Shoshana Zuboff) and the surveillance assemblage (Haggerty & Ericson), I critically reflect on how algorithms fracture identity and shape our online experiences.

Using Instagram’s Download Your Information tool, I gathered my own data and transformed it into a creative response. Through collage, glitch aesthetics, and distorted self-portraits, I visualized the invisible process of dataveillance. Influences from André Breton’s surrealist writing and Salvador Dalí’s dream imagery guided my work, alongside contemporary critiques of digital surveillance.

Each piece represents a facet of algorithmic control: fractured identities, fragmented time, surveilled speech, echo chambers, and the claustrophobic sense of drowning in endless data. Together, they reveal how the algorithm not only monitors but also reconstructs our desires, behaviors, and sense of self.

This project is both research and resistance a way of exposing the hidden mechanisms of digital surveillance while reimagining them through art. Presented at Expanded Data (2025), the work was praised for its fusion of critical theory and poetic visual storytelling

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