Open Access‘Speaking the Data’: Renegotiating the Digitally-Mediated Body Through Performative Embodied Praxis, Sound and Rhythmic Affect
Author(s) -
Kathryn Lawson Hughes
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
cultural studies/critical methodologies/cultural studies critical methodologies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1552-356X
pISSN - 1532-7086
DOI - 10.1177/15327086211027501
Subject(s) - praxis , performative utterance , embodied cognition , agency (philosophy) , affect (linguistics) , sonification , aesthetics , performativity , psychology , computer science , sociology , human–computer interaction , communication , epistemology , art , artificial intelligence , social science , philosophy , gender studies
This article explores an alternative autoethnographic methodological approach, using embodied praxis and sound, for critically re-thinking contemporary subjective health practices of digital ‘self-tracking’; popularized in recent years through the rise in wearable biometric fitness devices, and online socio-cultural movements such as the Quantified Self and Strava platforms, which enable subjects to “share” their quantifiable body-data metrics. Through a performative praxis case study titled Speaking the Data (2017), the author renegotiates the “voice” of subjective agency within the quantitative data-discourse, “speaking the data” that her body is producing in “real-time” on a digital smart-bike machine. This embodied renegotiation, recorded using a sound “data-stream,” produces an alternative subjective data-set which is extended to the reader, who is invited to become “listener” in the theoretical/experiential praxis space. The sound “data-stream” thus proffers an affective expansion to our perceptions of what “body-data” can be, extending the possibilities for the digitally mediated body beyond biometric forms of quantification, through other sensorial registers of embodiment, using sound, rhythmic affect and lived experience.