Upon Not Opening The Black Box

On the eve of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) coming into effect we, a university laboratory, marked the occasion with an interactive installation called Compliance. Data traces from Compliance were subsequently processed by the lab, here enacted in the form of a play. While much discussion has centered around modern 'black-boxed' processing of data, less attention has been paid to the value of the data itself, and whether it merits use. We draw on dramaturgical methods for both analysis and presentation [15], allowing for readers to imagine staging their own, different, versions of the event. Drawing on the ambiguous ontological status of (yet unexamined) data, we offer a discussion on the value of data, its use and non-use, as well as how to live with this ambivalence, continuously negotiating social contracts about our further conduct with the data.