Event Title

Critically Remaking the Quantified Self

Presenter Information

Gabi Schaffzin
Zachary Kaiser

Location

PSY-228B

Start Date

3-11-2017 1:45 PM

End Date

3-11-2017 4:45 PM

Description

We will run a three hour workshop in which we teach 10 students how to "break open" a quantified-self device. You will learn how QS devices work, how they communicate with your computer or mobile device, what tools we can use to try to intercept these communications, and—most importantly—how an exercise such as this can be valuable in the classroom.

While quantifying the self is a practice that many trace back centuries, contemporary popular culture's recent foray into the movement is often credited to an informal meeting of 28 individuals at the home of Wired Magazine editor, Kevin Kelly, in 2007. Nearly a decade later, the group's vision of using a multitude of small, connected devices to track predetermined bodily metrics is a reality manifesting itself throughout both hobbyist and professional markets. Borrowing from techno-cultural theorist Paul Virilio, it is important to remember that with new types of technologies come new types of dangers, and so we have seen a proliferation of discourse surrounding questions of quantified-self devices' privacy, accuracy, efficacy, and overall impact on our culture.

This exercise is part of a larger project enacted by the leaders of this workshop, a project not only in which the nature of computable subjectivity is questioned, but in which we seek to empower fellow educators, artists, and consumers to reclaim the self from the quantified-self. Once our QS data is gathered from the devices we trust to count our steps, calories, muscle movements, or otherwise, we might have the opportunity to repurpose that data to our liking.

This project seeks to combine the benefits of multiple modes of interrogation: built upon critical theory, based on the use of QS devices, and presented in a manner accessible to a general audience. We hope that the result of this workshop will be a series of artworks incorporating data taken from quantified-self devices, but will reinterpret said data into forms that highlight a critical property of that data (e.g., its proprietary, obfuscated, or private nature, etc.). The communications philosopher James Carey (1989) notes that "Things can become so familiar that we no longer perceive them at all. Art, however, can take the texture of a fabric...the design of a face...and wrench these ordinary phenomena out of the backdrop existence and force them into the foreground of consideration." Carey's position here drives the work of this project, as the artists seek to reframe the otherwise mundane data being collected about a quantified-self into a means to raise questions about power, meaning, and identity not found in other QS-related discourse.

The workshop will incorporate an overview of the critical theory driving the project, but will primarily be instructional. While participants need not have any programming experience, they should not be afraid to make mistakes. We promise to not break their computers, but we will teach them how said computers work.