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Paper short abstract

This paper presents a politico-aesthetic artifact (re-search.site), a bespoke platform for exploring search infrastructures in workshop settings, which engenders participants to share diverse forms of expertise through experimentation with socio-technical systems as hybrid-knowledge practices.

Paper long abstract

The actors and dynamics of search are changing with the uptake of LLMs aka chatbots, which often provide one answer to all queries or an overview, instead of ten hyperlinks. To grasp the interplay between digital and data infrastructure and the politics embedded within these (search) artifacts (Winner 1980; Star 1999), new methods are needed to understand information/ knowledge infrastructures and to bring about technological literacies. Transient as well as opaque, what are some of the criteria determining search results, how can they be captured, compared and critiqued?

This presentation highlights results from workshops (Living Labs), where participants (re)search their interests with a bespoke platform (https://re-search.site) that enables users to visualise, compare and interpret their search results based on different browser/search engine/operating system settings and a ‘chatbot rodeo’ that facilitates a comparative interface of responses from the same prompt. Applying a ‘feminism of the broken machine’ (Sharma 2020), the data visualisations (outputs) shed light on certain power dynamics that are hidden in the backend databases when engaging with knowledge infrastructures of search. This tactical media platform can offer other patterns of technology, with the détournement of corporate technical systems through instilling ‘hacking culture norms to create these critiques,’ which in turn ‘offer new social meanings that can alter society’ (Star Rogers 2022). A politico-aesthetic artifact, the re-search.site is a media artwork and a functional web interface, which also engenders the participants to share diverse forms of expertise through experimentation with socio-technical systems as hybrid-knowledge practices that can foster change.