(Becoming-with) water as data

Abstract

I begin with water. What if l considered water as data and human subjects as only coming into being in relation to water? How does water produce the human and what does a reading of data as water produce? In considering the possibilities of water as data, I become aware that my research activities have generated a large body of work oriented towards water as onto-epistemological force. Adapting the method of anarchiving, I extract moments of water becoming data from four previ­ous research project publications which moving between contemporary Australian Aboriginal and Western new materialist frameworks. The segments extracted from these books form the archive. The anarchive, or new creation, is produced with the addition of a complementary piece of water data from recent writing, resulting in a conversation between Then and Now. The chapter is structured in the form of these four anarchives, each with brief analytical notes. It concludes with a con­sideration of the ontological, epistemological and methodological implications of becoming-with water as data