Yanni Loukissas

Yanni Alexander Loukissas, PhD explores how data shape and are shaped by their settings, through the development of critical methods and theory that challenge the myth of digital universalism. With an interdisciplinary background in architecture, computing, and social research, he brings a spatial perspective to Science and Technology Studies scholarship on data and AI infrastructures. Loukissas is the author of All Data Are Local: Thinking Critically in a Data-Driven Society (MIT Press, 2019), which explains how to analyze “data settings” rather than data sets, and a forthcoming book that examines data as “points of orientation” in the world, not simply representations of it. His research is grounded in a wide variety of creative and technical projects that serve as instruments of inquiry, ranging from community mapmaking platforms to architectural-scale installations. He is also the author of Co-Designers: Cultures of Computer Simulation in Architecture (Routledge, 2012) and co-editor of The DigitalSTS Handbook: A Field Guide for Science and Technology Studies (Princeton, 2019), which received the Olga Amsterdamska Award from the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology, as well as the Infrastructure Award from the Society for Social Studies of Science.

At Georgia Tech, Loukissas is Associate Professor of Digital Media in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication and Executive Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Media Arts. His work is supported by the National Science Foundation, including current funding to develop a “spatial scholarship” community within Science and Technology Studies. Before coming to Georgia Tech, he was a faculty member at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a principal at metaLAB, a research project of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. He earned a professional degree in Architecture at Cornell. At MIT, he completed a PhD in Design and Computation as well as postdoctoral research in Science, Technology, and Society.