A photo story by students of the Public and Cultural Diplomacy Program, University of Siena
Curated by Dr. Pouya Sepehr & Dr. Venere Sanna
1. A Question in Motion
“What is data?”—This question sparked a journey that was less about answers, and more about ways of seeing. The seminar began with curiosity, definitions scribbled in notebooks, maps unfolded, and a shared urge to trace the visible and invisible infrastructures shaping urban life.
Students gather in a circle, map on the ground, notebooks in hand. The city lies ahead like a text waiting to be annotated.
2. Charting the Invisible
Each group set out with a route and a theme—citizenship, the commons, ethics, surveillance—guided not by GPS alone, but by attentiveness. QR codes became portals. Public signs transformed into interfaces. Every turn offered clues about how Siena is sensed, scanned, and scripted.
A close-up of a public QR sign, revealing how information overlays space.
The recorded GPS path on a phone screen visualizes our trace—movement transformed into data.
3. Observing, Recording, Feeling
Some wrote. Some sketched. Others captured images or dropped emoji stickers in their journals. Together, they turned experience into data, mapping not just streets but atmosphere, affect, and ambiguity.
Colored dots mark insights, moods, and reflections—data that’s felt before it’s understood.
A journal page layered with concepts and flows—tracing infrastructures too subtle for sensors.
4. Seeing Surveillance, Reading Power
The walk brought into view what the city usually hides: the overhead gaze of cameras, the invisible hand of algorithms, and the bureaucratic scaffolding of civic life. To see data is to ask: Who collects it? Who benefits?
Students stop beneath a cluster of cameras. The gaze is mutual, layered in architecture and intent.
5. Coordinated by Code
Even the walk itself was mediated by data. WhatsApp messages outlined roles, responsibilities, and rhythm—digital traces guiding analog steps. The walker, the photographer, the note-taker: a civic choreography performed through sensors and screens.
A phone displays the task list—reminding us how even our explorations are pre-coded.
6. Towards Civic Speculation
This was not just a walk through Siena—it was a way of learning how to read the city anew. Data walking isn’t about extracting information. It’s about asking better questions, making data strange again, and imagining how cities might be sensed differently.
Dots on a paper map tell a story of encounter, interpretation, and collective noticing.
Epilogue: The City as Dataset, The City as Dream
Siena revealed itself not only through streets and signs, but through layers of information often missed: digital infrastructures, overlooked markers, subtle codes of inclusion and exclusion. This walk was an experiment in sensing—an attempt to feel data, to inhabit the margins of visibility, and to see cities not just as places—but as questions.
