1. ‘Speaking the Data’: Renegotiating the Digitally-Mediated Body Through Performative Embodied Praxis, Sound and Rhythmic Affect
- Author
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Kathryn Lawson Hughes
- Subjects
Cultural Studies ,Creative & Digital Technologies ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Autoethnography ,Performative utterance ,Digital Humanities ,Visual Culture Research Group ,Rhythm ,0504 sociology ,Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous) ,Sociology ,Sound (geography) ,media_common ,geography ,Praxis ,geography.geographical_feature_category ,05 social sciences ,050401 social sciences methods ,050301 education ,Self tracking ,Digital Futures ,Embodied cognition ,Aesthetics ,Health & Wellbeing ,Affect (linguistics) ,0503 education - Abstract
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.
- Published
- 2021
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