Big Dada, Big Data: Schwitters's Merzbau, the Private and the Trash

To contextualize the elusive tactics of big data’s voracious data harvesting and hoarding, this chapter anchors some of its mechanisms in a Dada art piece that can be understood as an analogue precursor to the digital cloud. Against the backdrop of privacy and archiving, German artist Kurt Schwitters’s (1887–1948) Merzbau (ca. 1921–37) shows that the Dadaist lens of nonsense can help to fathom big data.

Trash is an important theme in this investigation of the materialities, spatialities and temporalities at work in the Merzbau and how they can help to conceptualize big data. The Merzbau - like much of big data - was literally composed of garbage. The artist’s practice of accumulation and the Merzbau’s expansive nature are analysed against big data practices and the exponential growth of digital archives.

Schwitters’s personal shrines embedded within the Merzbau raise the issue of privacy. Building on Hannah Arendt’s understanding of the private as privation, this chapter sheds light on the distorted relationship between private property and data.