What does it feel like to be reduced to a row in a spreadsheet?
In this interactive forum, participants will become a “living database” — physically enacting how data categorizes, simplifies, and often erases the complexity of real lives.

We’ll begin with a silent movement exercise: each person receives a random set of category labels (race, gender, education level, internet access, etc.) and is asked to position themselves in a grid on the floor. Through a series of regroupings and card-swaps, we’ll explore what happens when data doesn’t match lived experience.

Participants will then reflect on how it felt to embody inaccurate data points or lose visibility within imposed categories. We’ll invite open discussion: What was missing? Which labels felt false or violent? Who got left out?

To close, each person will propose a new data field — something they wish a system could know about them (e.g. “daily fears”, “joy triggers”, “community support”) — and contribute it to a collaborative wall imagining a new, more humane database.

This session uses no screens, tools, or devices — just our bodies, stories, and shared imagination. It’s an invitation to unlearn the default logic of datafication and dream up relational, care-centered approaches to data and technology.

This activity is ideal for people working with digital rights, governance, AI ethics, journalism, research, or activism who are rethinking how data impacts power and visibility.