Exploring fractures in the intimate technology shaping millions of lives
Proposal Type
Individual Talk
Location
Narratives & Worlds
Start Date
July 2026
End Date
July 2026
Abstract
An artist's talk about "Tracking Free" (working title), a narrative game web app that offers a feminist critique of menstrual tracking apps and how they shape diverse users’ understandings of their bodies. This creative work is an output from an international research project, "The intimate technology shaping millions of lives."
Millions of people worldwide use digital apps to monitor their menstrual cycles. These apps can be experienced as empowering, but they're not neutral. They play a role in how users understand their bodies, and by extension, their selves, relationships, and place in the world. Importantly, menstrual tracking apps are designed around a prototypical user: a white, affluent, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, young woman, which reinforces narrow, potentially harmful, ideas about "normal" or ideal bodies. The research projects asks: What are the experiences of the many non-prototypical users, whose bodies, identities, or life stages are marginalized by these apps?
Guided by the research findings and the research team's analysis and feedback, I'm using HTML, CSS & JavaScript to create a narrative game that affirms diverse embodied experiences and amplifies marginalised voices. The work, which initially and superficially resembles a menstrual tracking app, sets up a tension for the player between competing desires: the impulse to log data and win points (egged on by "helpfully" nagging algorithms); or to pay attention to the experiences and perspectives of the characters, whose stories are embedded in the app. The characters are inspired by the women and menstruators who participated in the research and each one has an associated mini-game whose procedural rhetoric expresses some of the frustrations of using menstrual tracking apps. Their stories reveal more. The cumulative effect of the individual and overall gameplay and narrative/s expose menstrual tracking apps as paradoxical tools: useful, yes, but at what cost? In the finale, the characters are free to imagine a different tech and relational model, one that is more caring, collective and empowering.
Exploring fractures in the intimate technology shaping millions of lives
Narratives & Worlds
An artist's talk about "Tracking Free" (working title), a narrative game web app that offers a feminist critique of menstrual tracking apps and how they shape diverse users’ understandings of their bodies. This creative work is an output from an international research project, "The intimate technology shaping millions of lives."
Millions of people worldwide use digital apps to monitor their menstrual cycles. These apps can be experienced as empowering, but they're not neutral. They play a role in how users understand their bodies, and by extension, their selves, relationships, and place in the world. Importantly, menstrual tracking apps are designed around a prototypical user: a white, affluent, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, young woman, which reinforces narrow, potentially harmful, ideas about "normal" or ideal bodies. The research projects asks: What are the experiences of the many non-prototypical users, whose bodies, identities, or life stages are marginalized by these apps?
Guided by the research findings and the research team's analysis and feedback, I'm using HTML, CSS & JavaScript to create a narrative game that affirms diverse embodied experiences and amplifies marginalised voices. The work, which initially and superficially resembles a menstrual tracking app, sets up a tension for the player between competing desires: the impulse to log data and win points (egged on by "helpfully" nagging algorithms); or to pay attention to the experiences and perspectives of the characters, whose stories are embedded in the app. The characters are inspired by the women and menstruators who participated in the research and each one has an associated mini-game whose procedural rhetoric expresses some of the frustrations of using menstrual tracking apps. Their stories reveal more. The cumulative effect of the individual and overall gameplay and narrative/s expose menstrual tracking apps as paradoxical tools: useful, yes, but at what cost? In the finale, the characters are free to imagine a different tech and relational model, one that is more caring, collective and empowering.
Bio
Christine Wilks is a writer, artist, coder and developer of creative web apps and interactive digital narratives. In recent years, she has specialised in creating digital fictions for international, transdisciplinary, feminist research projects; for example, she made Voices, an interactive digital fiction for body image bibliotherapy, for the Writing New Body Worlds research project. Her creative work has won awards, been published in online journals, exhibitions and anthologies, and presented internationally at festivals, exhibitions and conferences. She has a PhD in digital writing from Bath Spa University. See her work at crissxross.net