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Running In Rome: A bio/digi-rhythmic soundscape

Hughes, Kathryn

Authors



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