Running together: Proposal for a collective bio/ digi-rhythmic soundscape

Hughes, Kathryn

Abstract

For the Running Artfully Network’s launch event in early 2021, I presented an experimental case study from my recently concluded doctoral research project, an audio-visual and intertextual work titled ‘Running in Rome: A Bio/Digi-Rhythmic Soundscape’. The sonic ‘data-stream’ explored how the digitally-mediated running body could resist biometric reductionist constraints of data-coding, through algorithmic processes of quantification, to be re-materialised as a rhythmically affective data-process, unfolding in flux.

For the Running Towards a Sustainable Future RAN reconnection event, 2023, I propose ‘Running Together: A Collective Bio/Digi-Rhythmic Soundscape’, a ‘live’ audio data-stream to be synchronously generated and sonically documented as our collective bodies run together. In interview with queer theorist Jack Halberstam, philosopher and trans-activist Paul B. Preciado has called for a “somato- political revolution” through critical practices of “dis-identification” (Preciado 2020). As neoliberal bio- political epistemologies of pseudo-democracy and technoscientific forms of data-capitalism invent ever- increasing categories for identity classifications, Preciado argues that “instead of inventing collective [systems of] identification”, we should consider “inventing strategies and techniques of collective disidentification” (Preciado 2020). Re-framing our struggles against hegemonical taxonomies which capture and shape the “affective energy of the body” into identity categories, to one of radical “de- categorisation”, from the “point of view of being living [bodies] on Earth” (Preciado 2020). The proposed collectively-embodied ‘bio/digi-rhythmic’ intervention would therefore consider the following provocations;

• How might we become collectively embodied dissidents of the biometric data-capitalist system?
• How might we become fluid post-human bodies, living beyond the constraints of biometric data-coding?
• How might we re-imagine our collectively embodied energies, multiplicities and affectivities, towards resisting identity categorisation and expanding at the “limits of techno-scientific capitalism”?

For philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984), in his series of lectures on knowledge production published posthumously in Society Must be Defended (2003), the ‘local character of critique’ presents a potential antidote to disciplinary methods of ‘all-encompassing and global theories’ (Foucault 2003: 6). This proposed collective ‘bio/digi-rhythmic’ running intervention could thus be considered, ‘something resembling a sort of autonomous and non-centralized [experiential] production, or in other words an [experiential] production that does not need a visa from some common [big-data] regime to establish its validity’ (Foucault, 2003: 6). The virtual/actual soundscape, an affectively heterogeneous collective running-body in flux, sonically surging beyond the constraints of biometric data-coding and technoscientific power structures invented by global surveillance-capitalism, would live on posthumously to the event as a bio/digi-rhythmic sound data-stream documented on the website.

References:

Foucault, M. (2003) Society must be defended: Lectures at the College De France, 1975-1976, trans. David Macey. New York, NY, US: Picador.

Preciado, P. B. (2020) Critical Conversations: Paul Preciado in interview with Jack Halberstam. Institute of Contemporary Arts, 21 February [online]. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJge51E4WMY [Accessed 10 March 2023].

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: Running Artfully Network Presents: Running Towards a Sustainable Future (Not from our house on fire)
• Start Date: Jun 21, 2023
• End Date: Jun 21, 2023
• Deposit Date: Jul 16, 2023
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/10945796