Being-As-Body: Quantification, Self-Affectivity and Resistance

Description

In recent decades, quantifying intimate and vital events has become a quotidien pastime. Commercial self-tracking devices are used to count the accumulation of steps, differences in heartbeat rate, changes of body temperature, varying habits of social interactions, and so on. Yet, in a practice so reliant on difference, dynamism and change, it seems the dominant commentaries concerned with these practices are writing about the atomised collisions of discrete substances. The apparent interfacings of “individual” bodies and devices read very much like the works of early modern physics. This is identified in the present study as the resilient project of the failed (failing) individual. In response, it is proposed that a processual perspective is adopted to pull away from the substantive eternal forms and essentialisms of (trans)-humanism. Contra the failed individual, a broad notion of design is used as an example of a non-teleological multi-directional occupation of process, which engages both the physiologies of the (post)human and the computational processes of the device in mutational forms of relational becoming

Period	12 Nov 2015
Held at	The Failed Individual
Event type	Conference
Location	Mannheim, Germany, Baden-Württemberg
Degree of Recognition	International