Tanja Wiehn, Lund University

Worldmaking with Synthetic Data: Annihilation and Production of Space (article)

In this article, we are concerned with the relations of synthetic data and space. Synthetic data – that is artificially generated data – is created and produced within virtual spaces and simulations. We ask in what ways this form of worldmaking of synthetic data can be characterized through a contradiction of the production and annihilation of space. Our theoretical framework is rooted in Critical Data Studies, which has long pointed out that mainstream visions of data neglect or obscure its spatial dimensions. Moreover, we leverage political economy scholarship particularly concerned with concepts of space and spatiality. Methodologically, we build on a technographic approach to critically examine the operational and social aspects of synthetic data via diverse publicly available materials. Synthetic data demonstrates a peculiarly literal kind of “worldmaking” (Amoore et al. 2024) via data: the making of a virtual world which serves as the place of production for data which will be used to train machine learning models deployed in the real world. Concluding, our analysis of synthetic data through the perspective of its spatial entanglements allows us to nuance new and ambivalent dynamics of worldmaking after the generative turn.