FROM HUMAN TO MACHINE TO HUMAN
Call to recalcitrance????
Quantification as a terrain for feminist action???????, ---> yes please!
Social experimentation by data collection. Same issue happens with body data that has started as a playful endeavor a gaming environment at the city scale, and that now finds new effectiveness through web 2.0 social network. Yes, in the uk we have the NUDGE unit working for goverment, officially the Behavioral Insights Team, their methods are completely data driven, life testing on population without consent, modifying peoples behaviour, they are now starting to do behaviour testing in schools too, of course, without consent.
Behavioral Insights?!!!!
http://www.behaviouralinsights.co.uk/
Self quantification practice is at the origin of new forms of body representations that blur the boundaries between what is usually considered direct social control (quantification) and an other form of spectacle where bodies are constrained in aesthetic modeled forms, it provides the unification of surveillance and propaganda aesthetics. This unified representational set also includes generated or prospective propaganda, where self tracking and mapping set grounds for bottom up social control by the promess to set-up a way of constraining the evolution within a set of norms, while the Cultural Grammar displayed in the process is highly efficient in disseminating neutral views of the body itself.
Yes - very interesting analysis, i like it
Just today i was at a meeting at a primary school they are introducing new corporate mathe-software /game environment to teach the children maths through point reward system. There are so many private service in uk school, many software driven, many aiming at replacing teachers in the future
SLOGAN : And I like winning. I want my life to be more like Mario’s in Super Mario Bros 3. haha..... sorry...not a gamer:-) would like to know more!
I mean, while many efforts have been done in alter games to launch a variety of models, mainstream digital body models are absurd (both for men and women) and are the visual conterpoint to a very limited view of the body (as in non psychedelic) one possibility of recalcitrance, is to trigger laugh by identifying absurdly, but weak axis.
Medical data dress making lab: Dressed in data, medically dress up, ….
Thinking about the ecologies of medical data through through dress making.
Data: healthcare records
The medically recorded body procides new pathways for government institutions and corporations into our bodies, how they are seen, and treated.
This is the issue not only privacy but indeed a vision of a chopped body according to number, maybe if we could transfer yxs brain into a processor so that she could continue to work on this project. In quantification there is no holistic sense, + it is incredibly focused on the self, obviously a trigger for consumer identification.
Can we use dress making as way to explore how bodies become re-organised and visible in new ways through medical data (and industry of big data), and how this exposes us, makes us vulnerable in new ways, to capitalist capture, to being profitable sick, etc.
Yes, how to translate this
Maybe a uniform, or some sort of a cage where we only become a set of numbers and that displays all aatractive possibilities into a vr or image, blue lagoons and moutains.
Why dress making? Clothes are in themselves forms of quantified space that our bodies are expected to fit into all the time in very particular manners and sizes. The form of clothing is based on capitalist and gender normative notions of bodies, that literally 'cut' the body according to its profitability. (Actually, old media art work by Nancy Pateson, Linux Dress which hemline raises and lowerse with stock market...pretty nice, from the 80s)
Magnificent Nancy Paterson is a reference
see also Joe and Josephine, Henry Dreyfus, measuring and norming the body as a premice to industrialisation that was thought for the greater good, although now we know how much the scale is an issue. --> great, will check up
Can we make data visual, through constructing dress patterns according to it, and then wear them, and epxlore how they reveal the body. We could a little open dress making lab, do some basic patterns based on medical records that people can cut and sow together depending on the data they choose. Would be some pretty weird dresses / but expose the body according to data, could use holes, colours, length, thickness to indicate the different layers of data... hhmm not sure. What you think? Be pretty fun to see everyone running around at conference in weird dresses.
It feels the experience must be palpable some sort of bachelor machine, that evolves according to possibilities or non-possibilities to correlate the right data.
Mmm... alternatively, we could also just make some experiments over the summer and present them. Ok I think my brain is going off on tangent :-)
Yes I have august pretty much free and was thinking of taking the time to work on this (Its already kind of planned, ll be in the countryside and maybe some friends will come over to explore the topic together).........; more info here http://www.lesoiseaux.io/doku.php?id=aout-a-osserain
Another idea i'm working on
Lost fat reclaimed
Data: data from dieting apps, other personal records of weightloss, eating apps, fitness apps.
Collecting fat data from dieting groups/forums online and use the fat data to rebuild new bodies using the lost fat. How can these fat bodies be informed by their stories, what the fat was/is connected to, what generated the fat (childbirth, trauma, abuse, love, depression, etc). What mateirals should the fat bodies be made of (reclaimed animal fat turned soap? / 3D printed, other reclaimed material?)
What the work addresses: neoliberal body forms, individualised pressure on gendered bodies, fat becomes is seen as individual failure, rather than a body in protest, mourning, or archiving its expriences. Can we think about how the body programs memory into fat? Digital dieting apps, proprietary gendered bodies, product markets, neuromarketing.
This is a full research, I agree that one of the effect of self quantification (and also neuroscience) is to dismiss long term time acquired knowledge and provide inmediate solutions to via measures and other techno-scientific processes therefore breaking the line of inheritance and transmission of knowledges and feelings.
Maybe take one specific case, and make some story telling, archive some stories and try to make a genealogy or something.
PROPOSALS
new pad: http://pad.constantvzw.org/public_pad/rixc-prop
Natacha and Alexandra is proposing to present a collaborative project "Workstation Title" for the Open Fields Exhibition. The "Workstation Title" will consist of a collaborative epxloration of
Natacha field of work
Alexandra field of work
Theory
The workstation wil be a performative space presenting the pairs collaborative investigation into the politics of body quantification and artistic practice.
We would bring:
1) set a a physical performative space ...tent pillows exchange space
2) e-textile piece of cloth dress caption device==> enable people to experience data on their bodies / the dress of quantification of
3) Conversation departing from how data feels
4) Interpretations of live- data
http://dowse.eu/
3. A 2 hours performance/demonstration opening hours, in which the artists will invite the public to particiapte, try out, and remake some of the work.
We would need:
1. Physcial set up with table/chairs/plynths - can be discussed
2. Access to electricity
3.
Normally we are used to having experience generated from visual representations of data, not data itself
Want to bring back the experience of the body, sensation, tactile experience.
notion of control - we want to challenge that
loose control of body - because you rely on quantification
Aim: overwhelming - powerless
have people wear data, and find a language to express how we feel.
repository of phrases and
record that live in the space how people feel.
problems:
invisble
corporate
lacking language for how we can feel it
We would do
1) have people sense how data feels
2) have them wear data
Un bureau d'étude-workstationg (nice word had to google it)
A sort of reference bureau where one could come and study his data case and give it a genealogy
I like the idea of work-station/bureau --> especially because we havent done the work yet, and personally i think it would be nice to develop something new. It could be more of a work station that could incloude both some introductions to our respective work of fiels and methods, what we have found out, the machines/materials we have used to epxlore the body politics of data.
A device
Some form sensory machine odorama cinescope feeding machine that would act according to your data
For the 9th i think we are using some sort of simple in-output board where we can hook different sensors into it and output in new form, so ei. plug in your heart, and output it in a vibration motor. With these things, i think its quite important to have a really good contexts or performative exercises so it doesnt become
A game environment
Maybe a labyrinth game, some form of tetris where you would need to reorganise some ofyour info taken from twitter for example according to a personal sensorial memory of the moment.
An Oracle
Yi Ching and other oracle devices to help you interpret your own data