English to Italian Art/Literary Art, Arts & Crafts, Painting

Non riesco a comprendere bene il significato di quest'espressione nel contesto che ho. Riporto un passo un po' ampio, cosicché possa essere di qualche aiuto. L'espressione dubbia (si trova verso la fine) è segnalata tra asterischi. Grazie in anticipo... Stefano

Perhaps data’s greatest paradox is the staggering discrepancy between its substance and its performative power, in other words, between what it is and what it can do. Data merely provides a representation of what was by definition already there, of a state of affairs that was experientially available. Yet, although it brings nothing new into the world, it has a paradoxically powerful ability to makes things happen. The paradox stems from the fact that data is at once the very image of abstraction and somehow terribly concrete. Data merely makes quantifiable and thus perceptible what was already there, providing a measurement of what people were living. Data stands in a curious grammatical relationship to its object: even if produced in real time, data is always conjugated in the present even as its referent is to some extent in the past, always already moving elsewhere.
[...] This potential is of course of double-edged sword, for empirically, data is value neutral (though empiricism itself may not be); it all depends on the use to which it is put. An artist like Trevor Paglen uses data compiling and presentation to great heuristic and subversive effect in laying bare the shadowy and often illegal operations of the United States military. One can be sure that the military too has been doing some compiling on their compiler…

Another way of stating the same paradox is to point out that data is never actually hidden, but “out there,” available – for anyone determined enough to sift through the reams of words and figures that drown the essential in a sea of trivia. Not only is the lived experience expressed by data ***embodied by those concerned***; even those facts that are ostensibly censured are often right in front of our eyes, like Edgar Allan Poe’s Purloined Letter.