New visuals for quantified self data
(proposed by Natacha Roussel, Vera Schlusmans, Juliane de Moerloze, phil langley)
« The culturally con-structed body would be the result of a diffuse and active structuring of the social field.»(Butler 1989)
This topic proposes to explore the functionning of Social networks based on collected physical data, self tracking and health monitoring as they are expanding very much, and propose a very specific social context based on a quantified view of our bodies.
People get together based on how many steps they have walked up and how much water they drink!
A continuous augmentation of quantification and normalization processes now reaches the treshold of intimate body data right at the skin level, it measures our activities our sweat and our weight on earth. The current processes directly benefits from data donation that are taking advantage of a long history of self help and support groups, but does not seem to fit into civil rights revendications associated to some of those movements among them feminists. We have looking at understanding those data in previous meetings of women and python group, we organize weekly in Brussels, in the context of samedies women and free software Brussels www.samedies.be
This topic will be a tentative proposal to explore further possibilities of different visual outputsfor quantified self data, such as for example social gaming strategies, alternative visual feedback data collision to get people do something different with their tracking data. How could we organise new parsing criteria, look a t the algorithms and set new visual outputs for this data + eventually set new grounds for interpersonal exchange.
An intersectional aspect of the track will be involving the hacking/ destabilising/ reimanging/ remaking of an open source 3D modelling package 'makeHuman', which has been designed for creating digital models fro game or animations.
http://www.makehuman.org/
This software takes a very particualr and problematic approach to quantification of the body. the software uses 'parametirc' techniques to manilputate 3D meshes to generate 'digital humans'
As part of the 'gender blending' workshop with constant, an alternative version - a fork - of the origial software was proposed, which is called reMakeHuman
The reMake human software developped by Phil langley as a study of the functionning of the make human modelling software as a co-tentative to decostruct body quantification in searching how treshold have stabilised in the make human software process to set fixed categories in genders race and other physical properties.
https://github.com/phiLangley/reMakehuman
the first steps to destabilise the package include;
- modifications to the GUI - by changing simple text files that control the language display
- 'decoupling' of the parametic controls that control the mesh
- editing of the .png image files that are used in the interface
- randomising the default values of the human
during this track we can continue the proces of destabilisation to create a 'functional' - and documented - fork of the makehuman project that challenges the assumptions that are embedded with the original and makes alternative proposals for self quatification
We will have sets of data at your disposal and open source pedometers, but Bring your own device so that we can work with it.
some links
http://smartmom.cyberfeminism.net/
https://bitbucket.org/benallard/galileo
https://github.com/openyou/libfitbit
http://opensourcecureforcancer.com/
http://www.academia.edu/1835830/Our_Data_Ourselves_Feminist_Narratives_of_Empowerment_in_Health_2.0_Discourse
https://github.com/phiLangley/reMakehuman