Data, Excrement, Information, Humors: Infrastructural Flows In and Outside of the Body

This paper extends an infrastructural study of bodies, sewer pipes, and fiber optic cables. I attend to the varied temporal rhythms of flows of data, excrement, information, and humors, and what complex textures might be read through their imbrication. Beginning in the sewer, I overlap flows of fecal data and digital information to gesture towards an embodied metaphysical conception of data as a vibrant, relational, social substance. I then add a historic layer to these flows by tracing information as a humor based on early modern humoral theories. This study addresses the development from pre- and early modern conceptions of information as the informing of a substance to its modern use as contextless data or knowledge. By overlapping digital, material, and corporeal flows, I reorient the flow of information within a framework that is materially and environmentally embedded, one that might allow us to consider how to reconstitute information in relation to our bodies.