Emergent: A Critical Approach to Performance and Biometric Data

The body is the database of lived experience. Emergent is an artistic intervention and performance that includes generative animations and sound compositions based on data collected from a consumer fitness tracker worn since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. As a portrait of experience of the COVID-19 pandemic through the data body (as both body of data and body producing data), Emergent engages with the memories of the flesh, becoming the impetus for aesthetic encounters through digital performance. Instead of focusing on the intended use of the fitness tracker as a technical object, Emergent draws attention to the gaps in data collection, goals not met, and the capacity of physical activity to exceed sensory quantification and collection. Through this digital performance involving data from collected during 2020-21 – a body of data collected from the embodied experiences of a pandemic – Emergent functions as what Bernard Stiegler (2018) refers to as neganthropic gesture, or the therapeutic means of resisting destruction in the Anthropocene. Repurposing the fitness tracker through an artistic intervention points to the limits these devices and the actions they invite (such as the promotion of physical activity through gamification), suggesting how such systems of biometric data collection can be rethought, countering the extreme rationalism of computation affiliated with quantification of the body. For Stiegler (2019), the Neganthropocene encompasses more than surviving in a present state of conflict, but a shift in thinking, working towards a habitable future. Emergent enables a means of rethinking the collection and influence of biometric data, revealing the limits of such systems while drawing attention from the body of data to the living body and the entangled systems we inhabit. EL Putnam is an Assistant Professor, Department of Media Studies, Maynooth University. She is an artist-philosopher working predominately in performance art and digital technologies, exhibiting regularly in Ireland, Europe and the United States. She is a member of the Mobius Artists Group (Boston) and the International Association of Art Critics. Recent publications of note include the monograph The Maternal, Digital Subjectivity, and the Aesthetics of Interruption (Bloomsbury 2022) and an affiliated issue of the International Journal of Performance Art and Digital Media, co-edited with Conor McGarrigle. She is Assistant Professor in Digital Media at Maynooth University.

© El Putnam

Uploaded on Saturday 12th of November 2022

Duration

00:15:16

Video

1920x1080 @ 30 f/s

Audio

48000 Hz / 2 channel(s)

File

mp4, 1.1 GB