‘Speaking the data’: Renegotiating the digitally-mediated body through performative embodied praxis, sound and rhythmic affect

Hughes, Kathryn Lawson

Abstract

This article explores an alternative autoethnographic methodological approach, using embodied praxis and sound, for critically re-thinking contemporary subjective health practices of digital ‘self-tracking’; popularized in recent years through the rise in wearable biometric fitness devices, and online socio-cultural movements such as the Quantified Self and Strava platforms, which enable subjects to “share” their quantifiable body-data metrics. Through a performative praxis case study titled Speaking the Data (2017), the author renegotiates the “voice” of subjective agency within the quantitative data-discourse, “speaking the data” that her body is producing in “real-time” on a digital smart-bike machine. This embodied renegotiation, recorded using a sound “data-stream,” produces an alternative subjective data-set which is extended to the reader, who is invited to become “listener” in the theoretical/experiential praxis space. The sound “data-stream” thus proffers an affective expansion to our perceptions of what “body-data” can be, extending the possibilities for the digitally mediated body beyond biometric forms of quantification, through other sensorial registers of embodiment, using sound, rhythmic affect and lived experience.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: May 28, 2021
• Online Publication Date: Jul 6, 2021
• Publication Date: Oct 1, 2021
• Deposit Date: Jul 7, 2021
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 2, 2021
• Journal: Cultural Studies - Critical Methodologies
• Print ISSN: 1532-7086
• Electronic ISSN: 1552-356X
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 21
• Issue: 5
• Pages: 372-380
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/15327086211027501
• Keywords: Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous); Cultural Studies; Digital Humanities
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/7511274