A New Quantified Self: Embodied Pedagogy and Artistic Practice

Author(s):

Liat Berdugo

Megan V. Nicely

Abstract:

We live in an age of the ‘quantified self’, where activities, moods, and consumer habits are increasingly tracked. Accelerometers in devices like FitBit chart our activity, GPS-trackers locate us, and advertising optimisations chronicle our web searches. This same monitoring also produces us as subjects. As arts professors, we intervene in this landscape – intellectually, creatively, pedagogically, and with feminist and posthumanist lenses. Through our pilot course at the University of San Francisco, titled The Quantified Self: Technology, Choreography, and Embodiment, we broaden understandings of key terms within the framework of public data. Our pedagogies expand the three central Quantified Self (QS) questions – What did you do? How did you do it? What did you learn? – and their implications, producing artistic and interventionist outcomes. Our contribution to the field is to deconstruct the QS framework, opening these areas to further inquiry. We then pose a reconstructed framework that broadens conceptions of data’s form and its relationship to embodied experiences. By uncoupling methodology from its prior attachment to science, our approach resists techno-utopianism, ultimately destabilising notions of ‘self’. Finally, our framework pushes back against the stated QS outcome of ‘learning’, favouring instead ‘challenging’ or ‘provoking’ the sovereignty of algorithmic rule.

Documentation:

https://doi.org/10.1080/14794713.2019.1569348

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