Running In Rome: A bio/digi-rhythmic soundscape

Hughes, Kathryn

Abstract

This performative paper explores an empirical case study and sound “data-stream”, developed as part of a four-year doctoral research project titled Bio-rhythms/ Digi-rhythms: Synthesizing the Digitally Mediated Body Through Performative Methodologies. The rise in contemporary digital, wearable biometric “self-tracking” devices to facilitate subjective health and fitness-related pursuits in recent years, has indisputably proliferated a “culture of measurement” in relation to how we perceive our physically moving bodies; limiting our perceptions of the moving body in its inter-relational context to the unfolding rhythmic spatio-temporalities of our urban environments. In an increasingly post- digital globalized culture, as we integrate contemporary digital wearable devices into the functionality of our everyday lives as “technologies of the self,” the quantifiable biometric data-language that self- tracking devices translate our physiological bodies into arguably reduces the multivocality of our sensorial embodied experiences into abstract representational “data-products”, with “big-data” implications.
In the case study Running in Rome: A Bio/Digi-Rhythmic Soundscape, the researcher’s digitally- mediated running body is re-materialized as a dynamic data-process in flux, through the empirical and sensorial materiality of a sound “data-stream.” As her running body moves in affective inter- subjective relation to the rhythmic spatio-temporalities unfolding in and around the Villa Borghese Gardens public park, in the urban city centre of Rome, the research process is made audible to the reader/listener through the sound “data-stream.” Sound is used as an embodied autoethnographic methodological praxis for re-imagining the “voice” of subjective agency, in resistance to biometric data-paradigms of quantification, which dominate contemporary health discourses. Philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis is applied as a methodology for re- imagining a rhythmic synthesis of embodied experience as it is mediated in real-time through the digital device. The “bio/digi-rhythmic” soundscape thus proposes a phenomenological “acoustic ecology” of the digitally-mediated running body, which converges the body’s “bio-rhythms” and “digi-rhythms” with the affective entanglements of the urban, environmental, socio-cultural and biopolitical rhythms of contemporary city life. This alternative subjective “data-set” further extends the potentialities for what embodied data can be, by affectively engaging the reader/listener’s embodied rhythms in the theoretical/experiential space of praxis. Towards synthesizing existing binary perceptions between self/other, the bio/digital, the qualitative/quantitative and the virtual/actual dimensions of contemporary lived experience.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: Cities in a Changing World: Questions of Culture, Climate and Design
• Start Date: Jun 16, 2021
• End Date: Jun 18, 2021
• Acceptance Date: Sep 30, 2021
• Online Publication Date: Feb 18, 2022
• Publication Date: Feb 18, 2022
• Deposit Date: Feb 18, 2022
• Volume: 24.1
• Pages: 311-319
• Series Title: AMPS Proceedings Series
• Series Number: 24.1
• Series ISSN: 2398-9467
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/9030933
• Publisher URL: https://amps-research.com/proceedings/
• Additional Information: Production Editor: Eric An; ; Series Editor: Dr. Graham Cairns